I Wasn't Scared of the Email (I Was Scared of What Came After)

When I ran my own non-profit, one of the hardest things for me was fundraising. It was the bane of my existence.

In hindsight, I understand that my FOMU was raging, but at the time, I felt like a failure. Advice was often “Just make the ask!” or “Send the email”. I would agonize over every word. Soften my asks with phrases like “and if you don’t want to donate that’s ok too.” I was terrified of what people would think of me. I would spend hours upon hours drafting and second-guessing.

And when I did finally take the action, I was white knuckling it, powering through whatever I felt, ignoring all that was going on below the surface. I got some yeses, I got some no’s. I survived them all, but I mostly avoided fundraising. I never cracked the code on building a sustainable organization, and I know my FOMU had a lot to do with that.

A lot of times we’re encouraged to just do the thing, whatever it is that scares us. We’re not all afraid of the same things (for me, it was fundraising, for you, it's probably something else), but the mechanisms and patterns are the same.

And now I understand something I couldn’t see then. Yes, I survived every no. But surviving isn’t recovering. Without recovery, the fear never got smaller. I was scared to take the action because I never stopped being terrified of worst case scenarios.

We talk about confidence a lot, but we don’t talk enough about recovery.

“Just send the email” isn’t bad advice. But for someone with FOMU, the email isn’t the scary part. The potential for a negative result is.

More than likely, you have beliefs you internalized long ago about mistakes, and those beliefs are hiding in a dark closet, informing your decisions, often at the expense of yourself.

The answer isn’t just to keep powering through and denying your fears and physical reactions (heart pounding, sweaty palms and anything else you feel when your FOMU fires). They’re there for a reason.

Rather than running from them, what really works is having the courage to grab a flashlight and look at what’s hiding in the closet. You can get curious about the beliefs you have about mistakes, about falling short, about disappointing someone, and understand which you want to keep and which you’re ready to let go.

When you can see mistakes differently, the fear of negative outcomes loses its grip. It’s all a part of the FOMU cycle (what we do to ourselves before, during and after a mistake) that's often running on autopilot.