Fear is the great dream killer. Overcome it now.
Exactly how to overcome subconscious fears limiting your potential
Welcome to Week 3 of An Insanely Simple Plan to Actually Achieve Your Goals.
This structured, 4-week plan is about building the clarity and confidence you need to live as your highest self during the last few months of 2024.
You will:
Clearly define purposeful goals with a practical action plan to achieve them
Release the fear holding you back from achieving your goals this Fall » you are here
Join the Journaling Club to access the full course. This is the low-cost, high value membership for finding your life purpose and becoming successful by following your heart.
When change seems hard to make, when bad habits take hold, when you feel like a fool for talking about your desires even with those you love the most, there’s a reason.
A deeper reason than not enough time, willpower or luck.
Without understanding these deeper reasons, you’ll continue to struggle to make changes, achieve your goals, find purpose and fulfilling work.
I’ll never forget the sweltering night I first shared my dreams with my husband, only for them to catch in my throat.
We were walking our dog, Jake (who sadly passed earlier this year), and I tentatively shared the vision bubbling up in my heart.
A dream of blogging, growing an audience around my words, sharing my hard-won wisdom of healing emotionally after early-life trauma and surviving cancer to find my purpose, and build a career around it.
My still-cloudy vision made sense in my head, but the words wouldn’t come.
I realized in that moment that if I couldn’t share my dreams with the man who I most loved in the world, I had deeper problems than not knowing how to achieve my goals.
And yet, I dug deep, faced my fears, and took steady action.
I was strong willed. I pushed through despite negative self-talk that told me I was delusional — who do you think you are?, not good enough, too old, too ordinary to achieve anything interesting or cool.
Pursuing my dreams often felt like running forward with a weight tied around my waist.
I worked on my mindset, shifted limiting beliefs, and even though honoring my pain had once brought great healing, I now turned against it and myself, railroading over the accumulating pain of tiny disappointments, which over time, turned into a mountain.
This contributed to burnout. It wasn’t so much the amount of work I was doing, but the depleting burden of moving forward despite the backward drag of unprocessed fear that I attempted to pave over with positive thinking, even though I knew better.
Whether you, like me, are already on the path of realizing your dream career, or have yet to begin that journey, if you feel held back by something you can’t explain, this is why.
How subconscious fears hold you back from realizing your dreams.
1. Fear can stop you from finding clarity.
You might think you don’t know what you want, but we always know what we want. It’s true that sometimes you need to take a minute to collect yourself, especially during crossroads moments, when one chapter has ended and another has yet to begin.
Even then, I would wager that underneath the pain of one chapter ending is the clarity guiding you to the next, and it can happen much more quickly if you open your heart to your fear and process rather than resist it.
Some people, however, find themselves lost or uncertain for years, feeling blocked from moving forward and unsure what they want. In these cases, a collection of fears holds you back, fears we’ll discuss in a moment.
2. Fear can stop you from starting, even with clarity.
You may feel trapped in a purgatory of planning and dreaming but never doing.
Or perhaps you never seem to find the time, an overflowing to-do list blocking you from prioritizing what matters most.
In either case, the real problem is deeper fears making unhappiness safer than taking a risk.
It’s totally natural to feel afraid. But you need to become aware of your fears and learn how to process them so they no longer hold you back.
3. Fear can steer you down the wrong path.
Action from fear is different than action from faith. Your motivation influences the choices you make — and your results, which is a discussion for another day.
When you’re afraid, you play to avoid losing time, money or confidence rather than playing to win. You avoid the risks your heart is asking you to make, leaving you even more stuck and uncertain.
If you do what’s easy or low-risk instead of what you really want because you’re afraid, the result will appear to confirm your fears when the truth is, it wasn’t the right action in the first place.
Note: there’s a difference between small steps and tiny experiments, which I’m a huge fan of, and simply doing the less risky thing. Do the BIG thing, in small steps.
If you postpone big moves until you feel confident, you don’t realize confidence comes from making mistakes and learning from them, rather than never making them at all.
When you have faith, you trust your heart’s guidance. You think about the cost of inaction, embrace new experiences even if they don’t work out as intended, and trust that even so-called failures help you grow in the way you’re meant to.
You know it’s all necessary. Achieving your goals isn’t just about getting what you want, but becoming the strong, confident, skilled person capable of creating them.
The biggest fears that stop people from achieving their goals
Now that you understand how fear can freeze your progress, let’s explore common fears. There are many more, of course, but these are the most common my clients and I experience.
1. The fear of inadequacy
Nobody has the skills to realize their dreams at first. Elon Musk wasn’t born knowing how to build electric cars or spaceships.
It’s something to work toward, to gain skills for, to try and fail and learn and try again. The great adventure of your life.
If you have the dream, you must have the faith it’s yours to realize. This isn’t something to wish or hope for.
Wishy washy energy will never get you want you want. You must do the inner work to become clear, focused and certain.
2. The fear of judgment
I remember feeling so afraid of what people would think of my spiritual life coach journey that I started posting on Instagram anonymously 10 years ago.
I worried what my freelance clients would think, but I also worried what people from high school would think even though I didn’t speak to anyone anymore.
I fretted over the opinions of strangers on the Internet who I’d never meet, who didn’t pay my bills, and honestly had no impact on my life other than imagined criticism living rent-free in my head.
3. The fear of failure
Fears of inadequacy naturally create fears of failure.
Taken at face value, failure is simply an experiment that didn’t produce the desired result. It may involve falling short of expectations — you may feel failure even if the result was good, but below your goal. Or it may involve total zero, nothing works, start over.
What hurts more than the outcome is the story we tell ourselves about what failure means.
We worry we failed because we don’t have what it takes, that our dreams are delusions, that we’re meant for a lifetime wanting goals we don’t know how to achieve.
The story of what failure means is what’s painful. That’s what you need to change in order to find your purpose and make it your career.
4. The fear of change and uncertainty
A lot of women in particular worry about how success will change their relationships. It’s common to see women gain a high level of success and then get divorced. This is honestly something that worries me, too.
Meanwhile, some friendships revolve around judging, complaining or gossiping. An insecure friend may not celebrate your success, making you less likely to aim high.
We need to have faith that as we grow, our relationships can also grow. I’ve found the more I show up as an expanded version of myself, others show up that way too, even if they’re not on a similar journey.
Other relationships might fall away. But if someone wants you to stay small so they can feel secure, it’s important to ask if that’s who you want in your life.
You might worry success will change you, but that’s why the humbling journey there matters.
It’s true that some successful people are aloof, rude and miserly.
But an equal number of successful people are kind, generous and grounded.
You get to choose which personal qualities you cultivate, and that means you get to nurture the best aspects of yourself as you realize your goals.
Understanding and processing your fears is key to finding your purpose and making a living from it.
Releasing the unprocessed fear holding you back is the greatest gift to give yourself.
This is the work that will give you confidence in your dreams, and yourself, without needing the world to validate your vision.
Once you’ve faced yourself, there’s nothing left to fear.
Upgrade to the full course for step-by-step guidance on turning inspiration into real results.
My superpower is asking the perfect questions to help you grow. That’s why I’m known as the Journaling Queen!
This week, you will:
Understand fear from a mind / body perspective so you create the emotional consistency required to achieve your goals.
Discover how simple words you don’t even realize you’re saying are sabotaging your results, and what to do about it.
Unroot subconscious attachments to the way things are, freeing your energy for rapid shifts.
Align yourself totally — mind, body and spirit — with your heart’s desires to feel complete certainty and faith around the life you’re creating.
The Journaling Club is the low-cost, high-value membership for finding your life purpose and becoming successful by following your heart.
Membership includes access to structured journal prompts, encouraging community and personalized support.
I’d absolutely love to support your journey!
All the love,
Suzanne
I like to believe that fear is there because we care deeply about a thing. If I didn't care about the thing in front of me, then why would I be feeling all of these emotions. For me, fear is often an indicator that it's exactly the direction I should be going in.
It can sound counterintuitive to take a step back and DO “nothing,” but in reality we are creating a beautiful space for ourselves to rest, heal, and open to what potentially lies ahead.
When I took a step back from most things in August, I didn’t know what the path forward was going to look like. But I ventured forward with trust. Trusting that picking a singular path (thanks again for that 😉) would lead to something. I’m glad I trusted :)