Fear and Shadows

I’m thinking about fear. Fear is sneaking up on me again. I’m taking a big risk by not working and trying to build a hypnotherapy practice. It has taken time for training, and to figure out what I am going to do, and that time had eaten into my savings. Now to the point where I am beginning to wonder if I have a chance at this at all. Logically, I have another few months before things get critical, but try telling that to that to that little part of myself that nibbles away at your confidence whenever you’re alone. Logic be dammed, it just looks at my shrinking bank balance and keeps pulling the twin strings of panic and hopelessness, “Do something now!” it screams. 

What should I do? I could give up and get a job, but then I wouldn’t have much time for clients. I could make that work, but should I? Things could pick up at any time. I am looking at four clients this week and, perhaps, three next week, which would be great if they were all paying, but they’re not. Therein lies the conundrum: I do need the experience of working with clients, and I’m really not so busy that I can’t spare the time for free and low cost, clients, but it just feels bad to not be getting the income I need. The actual reality is that free clients are not a problem, and they won’t be unless they start to eat into time for paying clients. I’m told that it takes two years to build a workable practice, and at this point I’ve only been at it for a bit less than a year. I do feel that I’m starting to get some traction, but I can’t really see the future, I don’t know if I should wait it out, or give up and start working now. In reality, if someone offered me a job right now, I’d take it.

It’s like playing a video game, or one of those movies about someone who accomplished same great feat. You know the movies, where they have some great dream and they struggle and struggle and then, just when all seems lost, something happens and he is vindicated and everybody is saved at the eleventh hour. In video games, at least the story ones that I like, you never know how close you are to the end. You keep working, what seems like forever, finding clues, solving puzzles toward whatever grand goal the game has for you, and then, almost without warning, you’re done. You’ve finished the last task, solved the last puzzle, uncovered the last secret and it’s all over. Afterwards, your whole perspective changes and you see how close you were all along, you just didn’t know it. And in those movies, you want to cheer the characters on, “don’t give up,” you say, because you know that they are going to make it. But real life doesn’t always work like that. Maybe one day I will look back at this time and tell it as a great story, how I stuck it out, against the odds, and made it in the end. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll give it my all, throw everything I have into the ring and still come up short, it happens all the time. So, the question becomes, how close am I willing to cut it? How close are *we* willing to cut it? 

Most small business fail. That’s what statistics say. I’m not going to come to any firm decision right now, or tomorrow, but I will have to create a hard stop soon, know when enough’s enough, make up my mind and draw that line. And do it before I reach that point of no return. It’s what they always say “It take money to make money,” and I could probably generate more leads if I sunk a lot of money into advertising, but that’s were the fear comes in. When you don’t have a lot of cash, spending hurts. I’m seeing that it’s getting harder and harder to pay for things, even though I know I need them. Like the Chamber of Commerce, everything tells me that I need to join and get myself out there, but it’s so hard to pony up that cash. Thus is the dilemma of risk, it wouldn’t be a risky if it was easy. 

You probably hear the same stories I do, about the serial entrepreneurs who start and fail thee or four times before they succeed. I have to wonder, how big a risk did they take, if they can just start up a new business in nothing flat after the old one falls apart? It seems to me that if they can turn around so fast and find the capital for a new company, they must not have put a whole lot into the last one. It must be nice to do all your risking with somebody else’s money. These are held up a wonderful examples of examples of tenacity, but I wonder: Just how dedicated and tenacious is it, to gamble with some else’s money? Or with so much money that the loss doesn’t hurt. Don’t get me wrong, these are talented and hard working people. I just don’t think that they are displaying anywhere near the balls they are given credit for. They are nothing like the guy who sinks his life saving into some business, laying everything on the line. If he goes under, no angel investor or venture capital firm is going to hand him a pile of cash to fund his next idea. He’s going to have to dig his own way out with no help from anyone. How can you possibly compare the two? The second guy is taking a much bigger risk. He’s putting a lot more on the line than just his ego, which is more that these “serial entrepreneurs” can say.

So, here I am. I clearly have work to do, and I need to get at it. I have worked for years to banish those inappropriate feelings that ruled my life and kept me small, but some fears are true and appropriate, and I need to acknowledge them, and balance them against what I know to be true without letting them paralyze me. There is a path forward, as long as I don’t let my fears undermine my efforts. This have given me some clarity. Isn’t it funny how writing something like this can me feel somewhat better, somehow it blows away some of the shadows off the future, and that’s all anyone can ask, right?