Let Me Out

Got an idea? Confront your fears and challenge negative mind-sets with small concrete actions.

Have you got an idea for a book, song, film script or business stashed away? Why are you sitting on it? Get moving!

The first step to realizing your dreams is to overcome fear.

It’s normal to fear failure. Worry inevitably becomes the biggest obstacle when we really want to succeed. We start talking ourselves down. Maybe we tell ourselves that we aren’t talented enough or that someone has beaten us to the punch, or that we’re not qualified.

Repeating negative thoughts gets us nowhere. It leads to procrastination at best and self-sabotage at worst. Especially when that pessimism starts piling up.

Such negative thinking is almost always rooted in past experience.

Perhaps, for instance, you've never had a freelancer in your family. You might have internalized the belief that running a business is difficult. It needn’t be. There’s nothing stopping you from starting that dream travel agency if you really want to!

Equally, if you don't take that first step, negativity and fear can escalate. But the moment you get the ball rolling, even if it’s just the smallest nudge, things won’t seem so insurmountable.

A good way to unblock negative beliefs is by using a Brain Bottle Opener (BBO for short). These are simple time-limited creative exercises designed to unlock ideas.

A BBO works something like this. In a 15-minute slot, you could scribble down possible options for your new venture’s name. In ten minutes you could doodle some logo ideas. In a couple of minutes, you could buy a domain name.

By working to a fixed time and on a defined task, you can quickly snap out of sluggish and negative mind-sets. Every concrete action takes you that little bit closer to realizing your goal.

So that’s the first step. Where do you go from here?