Getting Over Your Fear of Starting Over | Chasing Curiosity and Sharing Boundless Insights from Ideas that Matter
Episode Details
Transcript
Welcome to a solo episode on the fear of starting over.
I talk to people for a living, here on the pod but also in my coaching and speaking career. And in virtually every conversation, I talk to people that want to do something new.
And it’s scary as hell.
But in these conversations, something new emerges. It’s this fear of judgment that so many guests have talked about here on the podcast. So is it really your fear of starting over that’s holding you back, or is it the fear of people seeing you start over?
This topic has been a lightning bolt to the chest for me. So let’s talk about what it really is that’s holding us back, and I’ve come up with 3 specific habits we can build to move through it, and live the bigger life we deserve.
Key Takeaways
- Most of us aren’t afraid of starting over—we’re afraid of people seeing us start over.
- What feels like a huge leap to you might look like a natural next step to everyone else.
- Stories from past guests like Sensi Graves, Karl-Allen Muncy, PrettyLynne, and Greg Boyd remind us that reinvention is possible—and powerful.
- Confidence doesn’t come before action—it comes from action. The second time is always easier than the first.
- Try the Alyx Parks exercise: ask people how they’d describe you to someone else. It’s a humbling, inspiring way to see what others already believe about you.
- Judgment—especially self-judgment—is often the thing holding us back. As Sylvia Baffour says, start by writing for yourself and acting before you feel ready.
- The world sees more in you than you probably see in yourself. Let that build your conviction. Confidence will follow.
Connect with Bob Mathers
Recommended Episodes
She’s Like the Wind with Sensi Graves
It’s Not Too Late to Create a Career You Love with Alyx Parks
Curiosity, Creativity & Connection with Sylvia Baffour
Throttle Therapy with Karl Allen-Muncey
What the Fxck are You Waiting For? With Greg Boyd
PrettyLynne: Soft Porn, Courage, Judgment and Finding Yourself
Bob
Welcome to the Growth Mixtape podcast, and I'm your host, Bob Mathers. If you've ever felt like you should be doing more with your life by now and are running out of time to do it, you're in the right place. I talk to ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and I leave you with two or three specific changes you can make to start living a bigger life right now. Alright. I'm excited about this. Welcome to bolo number one. What's Bolo? It's a Bob solo episode. Bolo for short. I'm pretty proud of that. If you're a regular listener, you know all my episodes up to this point have had guests, So this is different. I've had so many amazing people on here that make me think differently about myself, things I should try, maybe things holding me back. And until now, I didn't really have anywhere to put those. My role as a host is to do as little talking as possible, to ask interesting questions and basically try to get out of the way. So from time to time, I'm gonna record short mini episodes like this one to reflect back on recent conversations, mash them up with things going on in my life to see if what I come up with might be helpful to you, and that's the idea. It wasn't easy coming up with a topic for this first episode, but so many of my guests at some point in their life have had to change course. Something happens that sets them back or makes them question if the job they're still in is serving them. Most of the time, it's not. So if you wanna hear some powerful stories of reinvention like this, check out, episodes with Scentsy Graves, Carl Allen Muncy, Pretty Lynn, or Greg Boyd. But, honestly, all of them have some element of reinvention baked into them. And even in my everyday work, I talk to people that are questioning whether this is really what they wanna do with the rest of their career. They're they're a bit restless. They need a change, and they're stuck. And what I hear most often is, well, I don't know what else to do. I've done this for so long. I can't do anything else. They're afraid of starting over. I'm gonna call it FOSO, the fear of starting over. I'm also pretty proud of that one. People will say it all the time. I'm afraid of starting over. What else can I do? But I don't think that's it. They're not afraid of starting over They're afraid of people seeing them start over I wanna ask if this lands with you Are you really afraid of starting over? Or are you afraid of people seeing you start over? I actually stole this from an episode of On Purpose with Jay Shetty. So look it up if this resonates with you, but I'd appreciate if you waited till the end of this one. So I'm relaunching my speaking career. People know me as a customer success coach, and they're getting to know me as a podcast host. But speaking is new, and it does feel like starting over. But I don't want anyone to see me starting over at this point in my career. I want everyone to see me as the the kind of successful experienced person that does coaching and podcasting. I I don't want people to see me as someone that's awkward trying to figure out this new thing. It's embarrassing to be doing that at this point in my career. But it reminds me of a conversation I had with Robert Carley way back in episode number one, almost two years ago. We actually rereleased it recently because I was such a big fan of it. Rob's a composer of music for film and TV, and he's a really incredibly creative person. And he talks about the process of watching actors work. And he says it's actually quite awkward and embarrassing. And you're watching these big actors do take after take, experimenting with different things. And, sure, the final version we look at and we say, wow. That is amazing. But we don't see all the awkward, clumsy experimentation that happens leading up to that. Because most of us are afraid of judgment. We're afraid of what people will think in seeing us do these awkward, weird things. And so because we're so afraid of that judgment, we don't put in the reps. We don't try all these different new things. Nobody creates something awesome right away. It's only after putting in all that practice and doing all those weird, strange things that we come up with the version that we finally wanna share. So it's not the fear of failure that most people cite. In other words, if you ask people what holds them back, they'll say, yeah. I'm afraid of failing. It's the fear of judgment. It's the fear of people seeing them fail that's actually holding them back. So just like it's not the fear of starting over, it's the fear of being judged for starting over. So that begs the question, how do we get over our fear of people seeing us start over? First, this was a big one for me. Let's realize that what we see as starting over, others might not even see that way. When I talk to people about my speaking, they're like, well, yeah, but you've been doing that for years. Right? They're like, you you speak in one on one conversations with your clients. You conduct workshops. You do webinars. You do different events. You speak in your podcast. You've always been a speaker. So this thing that feels like starting over for me is just seen as a natural extension of what people already know me for, or maybe they already think I do. That's really interesting. You know, my wife, she's amazing. She's a teacher. She was. She recently retired, and now she paints. And she wants to teach adults how to paint, combine it with Reiki and yoga and other cool things that she's passionate about. And all of her teacher friends have cool plans like this for when they retire. But all I hear is how, well, I don't know how to do any of this. All I know is teaching. And let me tell you, if you can spend thirty years teaching adolescents something, anything that they have no interest in learning, and you can do it without them killing each other, you can teach adults to do anything. You have everything you need. You know, this reminded me of a conversation that I recently had with Alex Parks. And after the episode, she had me do this exercise. She said, reach out to ten or twenty people that know you well and ask them a question. How would you describe me to someone that doesn't know me? And I did this, and I must say it's a really powerful exercise. So, yes, of course, I I heard a bunch of very nice things, but that's not really the point. The point is that others see so much more in us than we see in ourselves. And this exercise reminds us how others view us. And that this thing we think of as starting over is not nearly as big a leap as we think. It helps us build conviction in ourselves, so starting over isn't as scary. And the fear of seeing of people seeing us start over isn't nearly the obstacle we think it is. I really hope that you can send a text or email to a half a dozen or a dozen people that know you really well with that simple question, how would you describe me to someone that doesn't know me, and see what you learn. I also think back to a conversation I had with Sylvia Baffour. Now Sylvia is an author and a speaker on emotional intelligence, and she was mentored by Maya Angelou for twenty years. And she talks about how Maya used to write for eight hours just to come away with a single page for one of her books. Now I think she was trying to be reassuring. Frankly, that's always been a bit terrifying for me. But Sylvia also talks about her own approach to tackling this fear of judgment when she's writing. She says curiosity is the friend that she has beside her when she's writing, and judgment is the enemy that she leaves outside the room and closes the door. Curiosity is the friend beside her. Judgment is the enemy she leaves outside. And as I'm getting prolific in my writing, in my newsletter, in my speeches, I'm trying to lean into that curiosity and seeing judgment as the enemy that I leave outside. I really like that visualization. For those of you that know me, you also know that I'm a fan of writing for yourself. You know, Rick Rubin in the book Creative Act says something that I've never forgotten. If you're an avid listener, you've heard probably heard me cite this a half a dozen different times in different episodes. Your audience comes last. Write for yourself. One of the things that I do, and I'm a big fan of, is called morning pages. So every morning, it's stream of conscious journaling. The thing that makes it different from journaling is you never read it, and you never show it to anyone else. You can simply start writing about the ant that's crawling off crawling over the counter. You don't pause. Every time you pause, that's your brain asking, is this dumb? Should I share this? What's the point? You don't pause, and you keep going. And the point of these morning pages is to get over that fear of judgment as you're creating, to build that muscle around creating without worrying about whether what you're creating is any good. It's really powerful. I do it every morning. Start with a half a page. I'd I'd love to hear how it works for you. So we've got Alex's exercise on asking people. We've got some, visualization from Sylvia on overcoming our fear of judgment. We've got writing for yourself every day with morning pages, and the last thing is acting before you're ready. We always think that we need to have confidence, and then we're gonna go out and do something, But it's ass backwards. Confidence comes from doing scary things. It comes from moving. It comes from starting before we feel like we're ready. You know, I went to open mic night about a month or so ago, and I was terrified. I almost talked myself out of it a dozen times, but I finally got up there. I did a couple songs. I forgot some lyrics. You know, the guitar wasn't great, but I did it. And I went back the second week, and I swear the fear was gone. And I was able to focus not just on the lyrics and the music, but connecting with the audience. So it doesn't take long for us to get over this fear of judgment, but it does require that we act, that we move before we're ready. And we start building conviction in who we are, and the confidence will come. So that's it. Ask people who you know about how they see you, the visualize exercise around leaving judgment outside when you're creating, when you're when you're writing, when you're creating, when you're painting, when you're doing anything creative, start writing for no one but yourself using morning pages, and act before you're ready. That's it. That is the end of Bolo number one. I can't wait to hear what you think. And if you've listened to this and you thought, hey. I know someone that might need to hear this, please share it with them. If you aren't following the podcast already, please subscribe or follow wherever you listen. Feel free to give us a rating or a comment, and I'll include some links in the show notes to the awesome episodes that I've referenced. It's been awesome. Speaker 1
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