Feel the fear and share your story anyway

Darwin's Delay, flying with a baby, and overcoming your fears.

We're all afraid of something.

For some of us our fears are very real.
Fears with a capital F.
Climate change, the cost of living, COVID for fuck’s sake.

Others are scared of the little things in life. 
Spiders. Insects. Or buttons — a condition known as koumpounophobia apparently.

Some of us are scared of life itself. 
Or more precisely, the stories of our life.

I've been helping other people tell their stories for over 20 years but for as long as I can remember I've been afraid of stepping into my own story. For years, I struggled to figure out what character I was supposed to play.

I jumped from job to job hoping to find myself in the process. Even after I carved out a career as a freelance writer in my early 30’s I still had this nagging doubt that I wasn't living the life I was meant to live. Or could be living.

I wasn’t living up to my potential.
I could do more.
Be more. 

The silent (but noisy) critic in my head became more and more persistent when I started my own business and started sharing personal stories to promote it. After all, if I’m a storytelling consultant I’ve got to practise what I preach, right?

So when my writing friend/mentor/coach sent me a prompt this week asking me to write about the biggest, scariest, most painful or regretful thing that has ever happened to you, I figured I knew exactly what to write about.

Instead, that prompt — write about the biggest, scariest, most painful or regretful thing that has ever happened to you? — forced me to pause and reflect on my fear of posting personal stories. 

Stories with the wrong ending

I mean, what have I got to be afraid of? I'm working with a client who wrote an incredible book about the highs and lows of living with her husband. He battled depression all his life before finally committing suicide. He left her alone with four young girls on a farm in New Zealand in the arse end of nowhere. Her book talks about the fear she had to live with every day, before and after her husband died. That's fear with a capital F.

Me? I've lived a privileged, sheltered, WASP-ish kind of life (even if I am a WICC, a White Irish Celtic Catholic and not a White Anglo Saxon Protestant). I grew up in a well-off, farming family in one of the safest places in the world, the West of Ireland.

I never wanted for anything growing up. I got good grades, went to a good school and a good university. I worked in a series of shitty jobs in my 20s but was lucky enough to be in a position to quit a recruitment job I hated and chase my childhood dream of becoming a freelance writer. 

Twenty years later, as I'm writing this, I'm living the dream. The sun is shining through my office window on a beautiful summer morning in Auckland. On another tab on my browser are the scarcely believable stories of the pain and suffering caused by the catastrophic earthquake in Turkey and Syria.

Thousands of people killed, flattened by buildings that collapsed on top of them as they slept. “Stories with the wrong ending,” as one news reporter put it.

They were the lucky ones. 

Many of the survivors listened to the screams and cries for help of their loved ones as they slowly perished underneath the rubble while they stood by helplessly without the tools, technology or manpower to shift the concrete tombs.

What kind of fear and guilt and anguish and anger are they feeling right now?
What about the hundreds of thousands of dispossessed, left homeless without food, water or a future.
How scared are they?

Meanwhile, my three happy, healthy kids are getting ready for school and my wife is on her way to her teaching job. I've just scoffed down a hearty breakfast and when the kids go to school I get to decide what I want to work on and when. I'm my own boss. I'm the master of my own domain. I've nothing to be afraid of. 

And yet…

I’ve written on LinkedIn before about the fear that most people feel when it comes to posting personal stories. Some of us are terrified about what other people will think about us. I know I am. 

I’ve worked as a journalist for 20 years but writing about other people is easy compared to putting yourself out there. Tim Grahl is a book marketing guru with multiple clients on the New York Times bestseller list. In his book ‘Running Down a Dream’ he writes about the fear of writing and sharing your work: 

“It’s one thing to be afraid of getting in a car crash, a rabid dog attacking you or a mugger coming out of a dark alley...But what was I afraid of here? There was no physical danger in pursuing my writing. Nobody was going to hurt me because they read an article I wrote. And yet, I was terrified. I was so afraid to put something I wrote out into the world.”  

I’ve been active on LinkedIn for three years and I still feel anxious every time post a story. So much so that I came up with a name for it.

Après-Post Panic Attack or APPA is that feeling you get a few minutes after you’ve pressed the big blue Post button on LinkedIn and shared your thoughts with the world. 

APPA hit me hard when I started sharing my stories a couple of years ago. The good news is it gets easier as you build up your writing and posting muscles. It’s like flying with a baby. The first time you do it, you’re on edge the whole flight wondering what the people around you must think as your child screams their lungs out. You soon learn that once the plane takes off what happens next is largely out of your control.

Your only job is to look after your child as best you can, not to worry what the people around you think. That doesn't mean you let them run riot. If they spew, or swing off the headrest of the seat in front of you, or run up and down the aisle, obviously you do your best to control them, BUT you cannot control what other people feel or think about you.  

When we post our thoughts and ideas to a public platform, we’re afraid of being judged, of what people might think or say about us behind our backs. Some people worry that if they reveal too much of their personality they’ll put people off. But that’s okay too. You’re better off targeting your kind of people rather than trying to be all things to everyone.

Some people wish they lived in a time when they didn’t have to feed the social media machine to get attention for their work. But as obvious as it sounds, if you want your work to be seen, you have to put it out there. That’s always been the case.

Susan Cain, the author of 'Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking', tells a great story about Charles Darwin that should reassure anyone who beats themselves up because they're afraid of sharing their story. 

"People have always had to put themselves out there. We tend to think that in the good old days, no one had to self-promote the way we do today. True—but if they wanted to share, or lead, or create, they had to go public with their thoughts too. And this has always been scary. Darwin waited 34 years to publish his idea that humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor. Scholars call this 'Darwin’s Delay.'"

Whatever you post is unlikely to be as controversial, ground-breaking or important as Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, so why wait 34 years before publishing what's on your mind.

Nobody really gives a shit

I work with business leaders, entrepreneurs and consultants to help them figure out their Origin Story and share it with the world. Over the last two years, pretty much everyone I’ve worked with has two things in common. 

1. They all have a story to tell.

2. They’re all scared of sharing that story.  

That fear is a story in itself. It’s a story that a lot of us tell ourselves over the years to avoid standing out from the crowd.

I’m not a shrink. 
I’m not an expert on mindset. 
And I’m not a fearless storyteller myself. 

I still feel just a little bit anxious every time I post a personal story to LinkedIn (not so much on Substack for some reason. It just feels like a safer space). Does that make me a fraud? I don’t think so. It’s just part of being human.

Steven Pressfield in his book 'Turning Pro' calls this fear we all feel, Resistance.

“If we are suddenly overwhelmed by fear, self-sabotage, the desire to procrastinate, to distract ourselves, we’re onto something. We’ve struck gold and if we feel this huge Resistance to it, it’s a good sign because now all we have to do is confront that project and do the work.”

Matt Church, the founder of Thought Leaders says that anyone who is in business for themselves, anyone who has to market or sell anything, has to get their head around this paradox:

“What I do is really, really important and I must do it to the best of my ability.
But at the same time, nobody really gives a shit.”

I love that idea of essentially letting go of what happens when you share your story and put yourself out there. If nobody really gives a shit, then what have you got to lose?

When I first posted on LinkedIn I was worried about what my old schoolmates would think. I’m 49 so I haven’t seen most of my old school mates for over 30 years. And yet I was scared of what they might think about something I was writing on the other side of the world. Ridiculous, right?

Stop worrying about what people will think or say. If you want to overcome APPA, taking action is the only way to overcome your fear of sharing your stories.

Start small by engaging with other people’s content.
Comment on what they’ve posted but add something to the conversation. Agree or disagree with what they’ve posted and back up your point with a story or quote of your own.
Learn by trial and error what works and what doesn’t.
And build from there.

For years, the story I told myself was that I was terrified of sharing my stories. 
But good things started to happen when I got over myself. 
When I overcame my fears.

It's never too late to change the stories you tell yourself.
What’s your story and what’s stopping you from sharing it?