Thursday, October 25, 2012

Fear, Rejection & Failure

I haven't blogged in months. After I lost my neice, I kind of lost my "UMPH" to share, I've been internalizing for months and I think I am coming around to being  a little more open and vunerable again. Maybe...we'll see.

It's incredible what you discover when you start to be honest with yourself about what's holding you back. The next step in my "marketing" for my business is to start cold calling some potential clients and taking them out to lunch , introducing myself and my work and getting to know them and theirs. But I don't want to pick up the phone ....why? I ask myself ...because I'm scared. Of what? I ponder...being rejected. I sit back and let this register a bit with myself. I feel like I am back in middle school, or high school, when you become aware , well at least for me, that some people may not like you, or want to be your friend. It's amazing after all these years, everything I have done and the friends I have made and the people in my life I have that I know love me and like me , this is still something that manipulates and controls my actions and interactions with others.

I don't know if there is anything more powerful then the driving force of fear, specifically with rejection. I was listening to a talk last week and one of the lines the speaker said resonated with me "People who say they don't care about what others think about them are usually lying. Often they care so much that they instead build walls so high and so strong to protect themselves, and isolate themselves from others to prevent others from telling them what they think about them." Obviously this can speak to someone different ways. I don't think that one should dictate their lives based on whether or not someone likes them, or thinks poorly of highly of them. You can know the truth about what someone thinks about you, but not come into agreement with it but to hold onto and operate out of the truth of who you really are. But I think one of the main reasons why we don't want to know if someone likes us or not , and what they do like or what they don't like is because we don't personally have a strong grasps ourselves on who we really are.

As a child, I heard of the story of the little wooden people, the Wemmicks, from You are Special by Max Lucado, the story did not impress me much, until I got older, and realized the hoops I was jumping through to avoid dots and gain stars and how I cared about them. The bottom line is this, I think it's important to receive what people think of us, regardless of who they are in our lives, but to invest and build relationships with the ones who invest and agree with the truth of who we really are. I think it's a journey most of us are on, to one degree or another, Who Am I? I know I can SAY (or type) who I say I believe I am, but I know I don't really believe it, because the dots are way to important to me, cripplingly so.
The past few years I feel as though I've been fumblingly along on this journey, people coming in and out for work or for personal reasons, but they are never really meeting the real me. They only get to see the coping mechanisms and the reactions I have designed to protect the scared little girl. I feel as though , I am a bit unstable as a result. When your relationships and life choices are dictated by survival/ defense or by your feelings, rather then a core from which you operate, you never know what you are going to dish out at someone, and people never know what they are gonna get when they meet you. Which is exhausting when you are trying to work and wear multiple hats. The amount of energy I have to pour into being  a stable and reliable professional is immense. We all expect our personal lives to never interfere with our professional lives or our work -but when your inner person is full of torment and confusion it takes a lot to put on a facade of togetherness when interacting with clients or potential clients. As a result, I think, all my other roles suffer. Our adrenalin and will power are finite, if they are not nourished they cannot be sustained. So the longer our inner battles rage against us, the more we burn our resources to be whole and healthy.
It's scarey, so many things are scarey to me - to be perfectly honest. And to overcome those things is scarey , I know I am totally in denial about different things - I start to process stuff - and then my heart just stops mid thought and says "We can't go their - we can't handle it." It's all bubbling under the surface, I can feel the wheels spinning underwater , but I don't dare bring them up to see what's on them. Because of course next to the fear of rejection is failure. All these "What If's " ...what if , what if , what if... it's horrendous. I remember hearing this statement once "All the difficult things that have happened to me in life I never worried about -because I didn't see them coming." The what if's I constantly worry about never come into fruition! But I waste so much mental energy on them that drains me from productive or life giving thoughts it's pathetic.
 I suppose to end the cycle, I need more honesty with myself, haha, more fear. But it really seems like the only option. Where did the lies I believe about myself that people won't like me, or people won't accept me or people will reject me , come from , in the first place?  And what's the truth ? No, everyone will not like me, but why do I let that attach itself to my self worth and cripple me? Why isn't it ok if someone doesn't like me? That sounds logical and reasonable, to understand you can't make everyone happy, but why do we still try and do it. I clearly don't understand this in the depth I need to for it to be real in my life.
Well I clearly don't have any answers, only questions, but I do have hope to press on for more clarity.

2 comments:

Katie said...

I just wrote you a huge comment about your wonderful blog entry and then I accidentally clicked out and it all erased! So I will try to re-create what I said as best as possible. I can relate to what you said about fear, not as a mother of course, but as a person that acknowledges that general internal fear we all have. We spend so much time expressing our fears of 'things' and 'people' and fail to acknowledge that maybe our biggest fear is that we aren't exactly sure of our selves. As we move through live, we see and experience things that transform our views of the world. We begin to lack that child-like mind we had as youngsters where everything was all gumdrops and rainbows. I find it is particularly the negative cards we are dealt in life that welcome more space for fearing the unknown. These negative experiences shatter our security within a word we felt quite comfortable in. We start to ponder on the darker side of life, and truly fear it. Fortunately with age comes wisdom. And I believe that in time we will be able to purposefully filter the realistic fears from the unrealistic fears. In fact, I think our negative experiences enlighten us and provide a pedestal from which we can stand and see the world from a different angle. I know personally, my first experience with life's cruelty was 2 years ago. Although it was a terrible thing to ever have experienced, it shifted my perspective. I compare my worries to this experience, and believe me, they now seem so small. I no longer worry about the unknown, sweat the small stuff, or anticipate the worst. I have come to realize that no matter how much we fear the unknown, it will always remain as such—the unknown. Our anxieties are natural, but as you said, most events we worry about never come to fruition. So lets save our energy for the known.

Cheryl said...

I Love You Are Special - very touched by a message about this at a youth convention as a new Christian. Cool to hear you mention that - I definitely need to be reminded - The stickers only stick if you let them - the prideful things or the moments of rejection.