One of my clients, Tom, runs a successful multimillion business, which has grown profitably and at the moment employs 15 people.

During our sessions, he realised that the biggest thing slowing him down is his fear of the future. This fear is more common than you might think. Many business owners are so worried about the future that the fear alone stops them from approaching new leads, looking for new contracts or changing anything, which inevitably leads to stagnation and even business failure.

Now, knowing that Tom is a bit of a cynic, I got him to do a simple exercise. You might call it risk evaluation, I call it ‘Fear Setting’ and it is based on the well known concept from the Stoic philosophy: the more you face your fears the less the fear can paralyse you.

Tom admitted to me that occasionally he experienced anxiety, fear and guilt.

I have been working with him for a year. We have done the usual things we do in business coaching – we looked at his vision and values, we’ve defined goals of significance and we have a 90 Day plan. We review this regularly and adjusting as we go,but Tom still had some head-trash holding him back.

Things that worried him were:

Should I become a 100% owner of the business rather than remaining a part owner?

How do I retain the customers whist attracting new ones?

How do I manage my relationship with other business stakeholders who are not involved in the business full time?

How do I make sure that my new major initiative doesn’t go wrong?

Should I buy that other company and expand my offering?

Should I move into the new, bigger premises?

Have I got the right team?

So, what did we do ?

First of all, I asked Tom to watch one of the videos I like to use for fear setting. You can watch it here.

Then I got him to do the exercise called Fear Setting. This is almost opposite from Goal Setting, or can be described as goal setting for cynics. We went through some of the typical questions:

-What could possibly go wrong?

– What are the potential risks?

– How would that impact on me and my team?

– What can I do to mitigate the issues?

The philosopher Seneca said: “We suffer more in the imagination than in reality”. Guess what Tom said after we had gone through this exercise? :

“It is not as bad as I thought it was!” Visualising the worst case scenario helped him to understand that some of his fears were actually easily managed. In some cases they didn’t even exist at all.

What it made him realise was:

  • he had control over more things than he thought,
  • he had exaggerated some things that he had fear of
  • there was no evidence to back up his fears.

In ActionCoach we talk about FEAR as False Expectations Appear Real. To us it’s more than a witty acronym.

There is nothing wrong with being cynical, sometimes it is a useful trait. But approaching your fears in a constructive way helps you to eliminate the head trash, that hinders you.

The outcome of our exercise was that Tom’s goals are now bigger, he feels more in control and he is reinvigorated in taking action in his business and his personal life. In other words, he is focussed on what he can achieve and his goals have even more significance.

If you relate to Tom then why not follow his lead and try the exercise yourself. When you’ve done it get in touch and let me know how you got on. We are called ActionCoach, not Think About it Coach so I’d be happy to talk with you about how you can be more like Tom.