Listen to Conquering Fears: Risks, Wins, and Raw Truths

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Hello, hello and welcome to the Been There, learned that podcast. I am Dana Byers and I can't help but start with a little story today because I'm always learning. Learning is a passion of mine. But the interesting thing about learning and why it's an integral part of my podcast and the title of my podcast is I personally don't really feel that I've learned something unless I've shared it. So to those of you who are kind enough to sit and listen, I'm just sharing what I've learned. So this morning I got up knowing I was going to record a podcast today and I had extreme resistance to getting in the shower. I'm confident that many of you can relate to that. Usually my resistance would be to exercising, but today my brain was not happy and was acting like a toddler about getting in the shower and getting ready.

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And so I'm just sharing that because I'm on the other side of that resistance. I have showered. I want you to know that, but that's not the point. The point of the story was I sat in the resistance literally on my couch next to my dog going, why is it a big deal? Why is it a big deal? Shower? And then I realized I actually don't have to get in the shower before I record this podcast. No one's going to know if my hair is clean or not, and then I recognize something. And that was this feeling of should I don't know about you, but the word should is a word. I really do not. I feel like it puts pressure on people. I don't want to tell people they should do things. I feel resistance when people tell me I should do something and I think I was about to do that until you told me I should do it, and now I just don't want to.

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So I'm just being completely honest there. So I was thinking, why do I feel I should shower? And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, I don't think that's actually what's happening. I think what's actually happening is I don't have a reason or motivation to do this other than for myself. That kind of blew my mind you all to really just stop and realize the only reason to get up and shower today is for me. And I had to ask myself, is that enough reason? And the answer is yes. That was reason enough. So I gave myself the opportunity to do what I wanted to do just for myself. No one else asked me to. No one said I had to. And it just felt really great. It took something I was resistant to and changed it into an experience of man.

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I just did a little something for myself that I didn't have to do because I am working towards becoming a woman who does things for herself, not just because anyone else needs her to or not because people are dependent on her. And so that was a little win this morning and I want to share that with you because I think we can often feel like we should do things and we might feel false guilt about them, but in fact it was completely fine for me to do that and to feel great about it. And I also just want you to get a sense of the things that as a coach I work through in my own mind. I have a brain that's going to try to convince me of a lot of things, but to sit with it and work through it is what helps me day to day, grow and learn in my life.

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So there's a little lesson behind the scenes in my brain for you today. Alright, today I am thrilled to get to talk with you about something that I've wanted to share for a long time. I've talked about it of course with friends over coffee. If you're on my email list, you may have heard tiny bits and pieces of this, but I want to share with you more holistically about some fears that I think we all face. But I want to share with you three fears that actually came true in my life and the risks that I took to tackle those fears. And I think that the heart behind this is that I have a strong core belief that I don't love the idea of waiting for a rainy day. I don't love the idea of holding out. I think we all lose out when each of us has things we can share with the world and we just kind of sit on them or we hold back or we wait unless God has made it clear that it's not the time to do something.

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I really believe there's no reason to delay. I value action if it's the appropriate time and God confirms it. The thing about that is though, sometimes when we obey, we just have an opportunity that we can take it or leave it, right? It's not like God has said, you absolutely must do this, but I think he gives us invitations. They're not life or death invitations, but they're opportunities and we can get really clear on why we're going to do it or why we're not going to do it. And I think the ideas that you have, the plans, the prototypes, the dreams that you have will die with you unless you give them a chance. But you're not able to really take an honest chance on these dreams until you've acknowledged the fears that might come true if you take the risk. So I'm going to talk to you about some of the risks that I took and the things that happened. First, let me ask you, have you ever heard of the bestselling book called Become Your Own Personal Assistant? Probably not, and I'm sure you probably haven't because it's a book that I wrote in 2016 and it indeed was not a best seller.

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And when I wrote that book, it wasn't a very large book, but it really was from my heart. It represented a lot of the way I think and how I function in life. And when I put it out there, I was just playing afraid of failure. That was the first fear I was facing. I was afraid of failure. We can put art or creativity or things out there and have our personal value and our identity attached to them. It can take so much behind the scenes to take what to others might look like a baby step, but to us feels like we have just crossed a massive chasm. So in that experience, like I said, my book didn't become a bestseller. I don't think I made, I don't even think I made a hundred dollars off of it to be completely honest with you, but I learned something by taking that risk.

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I learned that I will not die of embarrassment when people don't value what I value. It didn't impact me nearly as much as I thought it would to have almost no sales of that book. I was able to still value the words that I wrote and still embrace them and live that out and get to a point where I felt neutral about the fact that people just aren't into this and that's actually not that big of a deal. And I can go back in my brain to that memory in 2016 where I went, okay, so this didn't really take off. I am able to prove to myself that my world didn't fall apart. I wasn't dependent on that success and God supported me through that. So facing that failure was something that gave me a really great lesson, and I'm so glad I took that risk.

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Second, I at one point in my life really had to face a fear that I would take on something that I wasn't going to like. And at the risk of sounding a little bit selfish, I started thinking, I don't want to commit to something that I'm not going to enjoy doing day in and day out. So back in, I think it was 2005, I started a blog@danabyers.com and it picked up speed way more quickly than I intended for it to, which was a blessing overall. But I wasn't monetizing or anything. I just didn't really know how to manage what I had unintentionally committed to. so@danabuyers.com, I don't have that website anymore. I don't have that domain. But when I was there, I was blogging there for almost 10 years. It started out as a very small kind of crowdsourcing effort before we really had crowdsourcing.

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I was blogging about adoption, the value of adoption, why our family was pursuing international adoption. And I was really just inviting some people close to us into our story, and I would share updates there about our international adoption process for our daughter that started growing as things advanced. And we ended up, of course, completing that amazing adoption. We ended up moving overseas. A variety of things were happening in our lives, and I was just sharing a lot of spiritual observations. I was sharing a lot of observations about finances and moving and minimalism and things that our families were walking through. And I got to a point where I had up to 12,000 readers a day on my blog, and it really morphed into something I didn't intend for it to be. And I started thinking, gosh, I've built something that I don't want to stick with.

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I don't really enjoy this. I loved writing. If you're on my email list that send you a little email every day, every weekday. I love writing. I love that connection. But it was turning into sharing more about some things that were a season of my life and not really my lifestyle. And so I ended up facing that fear that I didn't like it. I didn't like what it had become. I don't think it was bad, sinful or wrong, but I just really didn't have a vision for it. And so facing that fear meant that I stopped blogging. I got rid of that domain. I took 10 years of content and it's gone. I learned through facing that fear that I can actually succeed at something, succeed at something that doesn't fully align with my life, and I can have the courage to say thank you, but no thank you.

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This is wonderful, but I don't think this is God's best for me. And by facing that fear, by taking the risk of setting the blog aside, I was able to open up just some new ideas in my brain, some new pathways, some new relationships and opportunities. And I am so thankful I took that risk. And I'm really thankful that that fear actually came to pass in my life because it developed my capacity to understand, yes, I can write, yes, I can create content, but I want to do it around the things that God is specifically lighting a fire in my heart about. And then a third fear I had to face was the fear of something I desperately love ending. And this happened in about 2010. My husband Chris and I had in 2007 sold everything we owned. We had an estate sale, we took our two young kids and we moved overseas.

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We were so passionate. We caught an early vision for something that is now known as church online. And so we started a nonprofit, and this nonprofit really played an integral part in spreading the influence of church online. We raised funds. We were personally training the first online church launches in non-English speaking countries in a few different continents. It was an incredible time. There were a lot of career breaking deals as far as walking away from consistent paychecks. There were issues of safety at time. And of course the big risk was in taking our kids with us. It was a risk to our marriage. We really not have money beyond the first six months and we're raising funds just to put food on the table. And the risk felt high, but we felt so cared for in the process as well. We of course had many people who said it was ridiculous.

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We were foolish, and then we had loving family and friends who supported us along the way too. But the fear I really felt in that whole experience was the fear that it would end. When I tell you that I desperately loved that season of my life and the closeness we felt to God and the things we saw him do, and the way my marriage grew and the way I got to connect and get closer to my kids, the way God showed me the gifts I have, it was such a precious time. And yet in the back of my mind, I was often dealing with the fear that this season is going to end. And you know what? It did, it ended. And for the better part of two years after we were back in the States, I struggled with different phases of depression. I had taken the risk and it definitely worked.

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It was definitely successful. It didn't end poorly. We just knew that God had said our season was up, and that was such a hard pill to swallow. But I learned by taking that risk and facing that fear that God is a radical provider. He is our protector. So when I obey him, I know that he is with me. He goes before me. He prepares the way. So those were three big fears that I faced. Fear of failure, fear of doing something that I don't really like, and the fear of something I love ending. And now I want to talk to you a little bit about a new fear that I'm walking through and how I'm facing it through risk. I've been processing through the fear of being able to maintain something to keep it going.

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To be completely transparent. My business, Dana, buyer's coaching, it's just over two years old right now as I'm recording this today, and it's still not what I consider to be a completely viable business as far as income, as far as consistency, as far as things like that go. And that's not really a problem. But I find myself, not every day, but many days wrestling with God about my capacity to just show up, to be consistent, to maintain things when I don't see all the evidence yet that it's going to work out. Because the fact is, I am all in. I love this. I think God has gifted me for this. I am hearing from people that the coaching I'm providing and the resources I'm providing are of benefit, but I still just really feel like things haven't turned a corn yet to where I'm seeing the type of progress I long for in the consistency of my business.

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But that isn't going to keep me from showing up every day. So I want to tell you one way I'm facing this risk right now, and that is through podcast. You're listening to when my podcast launched, someone told me, oh my gosh, Dana, this is so professional. And they meant it seriously, and I really appreciated their compliment, but it made me laugh a little bit. I said to her, I said, you've just got to know that I'm taking this risk as easily and lightly as I can so that I'm not over-investing. Really what I did, the biggest investment was a course that I took. I'll share the course that I took in the show notes. I borrowed a microphone that my husband has used previously in podcasting. I pay $9 for a podcast host. I got a free headshot from the place where I have a coworking space, and then I used a program, a resource called Fiverr to just get some help with some music and my podcast graphic, and I've prayed a lot.

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Okay? I want you to know this is a bare bones process. And I say that because I think people think, oh my gosh, this is such a big deal and it is a risk. My heart is really in this. I'm really putting myself out there. But I think we can take risks to tackle the things that we are concerned about just to one, show God that we trust him, and two, show the enemy that we are about our business. I am not about to sit back and let this fear take me over. I want to face it every day. I want to sit down at this microphone. I want to sit down and have coaching calls and send emails on weekdays to my beloved email list because I'm going to learn something. Even if my fear were to come true, I'm going to learn something and I'm going to get to share it.

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That to me, is the highest and greatest value in the experience of risk. So my expectation right now was to launch a podcast. Guess what? I did it. You're listening to it. My continuing expectation is to just keep showing up. I'm not sure if people are listening or benefiting, but I am seeing some progress, and I love getting to prove God right and prove my doubts wrong. God's mercies are new every morning. He's giving you and me fresh ideas every day. If we act on those ideas and use them as an antidote to the fears that we are experiencing, God will give us what we need every day. So in closing, I want you to imagine a big revolving circle. Okay? This is a big circle that's just spinning round and round slowly, and at the top of that circle, you are offering yourself up to try things in faith.

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And then as you head around the circle, God gives you ideas and you try those ideas and you continue in motion around this circle. You try out those ideas and you are learning from what happens. And then you know what happens. As you get back to the top of that circle, you draw closer to God. You repeat, repeat, repeat you yourself up to try things in faith, God gives you ideas and you try them. Then you learn from your action, and then you draw closer to God. Life is an iterative process. Expecting it all to work is really setting yourself up for failure, but expecting to draw closer to God and to learn from him is completely possible. I want you to know that I really don't carry any shame for all the missed hits that I have in my career because they have led me to this moment in sharing them with you.

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I can testify to God's provision and his presence through all of these ups and downs. So in closing, let me ask you, when was the last time you tested this principle regarding your work life facing a fear and responding through a calculated risk? And when did you last show up in faith to do something that you didn't yet know how to do? Friends, I know you can do this. Send me an email at dana dana byers coaching.com if you would love prayer or encouragement to get started. I am in your corner. See you on the next episode.

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