Fear. It’s the foe I battle every day. I believe fear is the biggest villain in all of our stories.

We know that if we put ourselves out there, stand on the stage, write the post, try the new thing, we become targets. This was my biggest fear in writing my book: that I would get a one-star review.

I found some encouragement from an unlikely source.

Reframing Your Objective and Perspective

Guy Raz was interviewing Gary Vaynerchuk on his podcast, How I Built This. Toward the end of the interview, Guy posed an interesting question: “How do you deal with all the negative feedback?”

I loved Gary’s response.

 “The reason we care too much about our detractors is because we care too much about the accolades… If I disappear tomorrow, God forbid, I’ll get nine nice hours on social media from people sharing clips, (if I affected them), then everyone will go on with their lives. When you realize you mean nothing, but you aspire to mean as much as humanly possible, you create a very interesting perspective framework that makes a lot of things easy.”

Interpretation: Fear of negative feedback slows us down, kills our creativity, inhibits growth.

Gary goes on to share that what drives him is not the “boos” from a crowd, nor the accolades. His purpose is to help others. 

The kryptonite to fear is realizing it’s not about you. Take yourself out of the story and make someone else the star.

The source of fear is self.

If I’m writing this blog to see how many views, likes, or comments I receive, fear takes a seat next to me and whispers:

“You aren’t a writer.”

“You aren’t smart enough.”

“You don’t understand the rules of grammar.”

“You are wasting your time.”

But if my motive is to encourage, and I remember that I’m a very small part of a very large story, I think about you. 

You are the hero of the story.

I have a new perspective, a “new framework” that makes doing the thing I was called to do a little bit easier.

What Next?

If this blog resonated with you, please feel free check out my new book, UnReceptive, at unreceptivebook.com.

Tom Stanfill

As Co-founder and CEO, Tom’s primary role is to create content that helps people live, sell, and serve more effectively. Find him on LinkedIn