It’s not every day you release a podcast.
It’s exciting, or at least it was for the last few months trying to get it all together. Then suddenly it creeps upon you, and the nerves hit you like a train. The fear is real, like the morning after the night before. Appetite, gone. Sleep? What’s that?
All the doubts come in, and the imposter syndrome goes into overdrive. The damaging inner comments flood in like “who the hell will want to listen to you and it won’t be any good.”
Now, this kind of thing isn’t just limited to launching a podcast. It can happen to all of us, at any time and it doesn’t matter what we’re trying to do. It could be something big or small. For lots of people, it’s the small stuff that really gets them.
There are many places this inner doubt or critic comes from, and we will explore that another time. Right now, how about we look at how to help ourselves deal a little better with it?
I call it the Bully, the Imposter and the Heckler. The Bully, because it tries to be mean to us and tells us we can’t possibly succeed. The Imposter tells us that we aren’t supposed to be here or don’t deserve the success. It walks, talks and sounds like us when it’s just the negative feeling inside us right now. The Heckler because it continually calls us names and puts us down.
The great thing is though, it can often give us the clues we need to help our situation. It can say something like “you’re not ready” or “you don’t know enough”.
Most of the time, we’ve become used to just listening to it and not challenging it. But how about we turn around and say “hey! What are you trying to tell me?” Maybe I’m not ready, so how about I look at the things I need to do to be prepared, and the same goes for if I feel I don’t know enough.
Take a breath, then calmly look at what areas I need to know more about and how I go about learning them. There’s always the point that we know enough and are ready, so it’s about showing belief in ourselves.
Show belief in ourselves by leaning into the fear or just leaning into whatever the issue is. So many times, I’ve turned away from the fear because I doubted myself. I didn’t test myself, so I didn’t learn how to deal with it. It wasn’t until I started leaning into the challenges that I really learned and really thrived.
It is scary. But if you lean into it, in time, it’ll be a bloody great adventure to look back on.
Go try it today, start with something small then go from there.
All the best,
Noel
