Are All Your Great Ideas Just a Cover for Your Fear?

Paula was a nurse practitioner.  She paid for the courses. She got her certifications. She worked for a year at this.

Then she decided it wasn’t for her.  She knew that being a healer was her calling. So she got her massage therapy certification.

Within the span of a year, that wasn’t quite right either.

What came next?

Chiropractor training!

Certification? Check!  Business started? Check!  Business abandoned? Of course.

Last I heard she was a struggling realtor in Florida.

That’s four businesses. Four certs. Zero  dollars profit. But the worst part is that she feels down on herself.

Sound familiar?

If you can relate with this on some level,  you’re not crazy. You’re not a loser. And no, you shouldn’t take the usual advice you’ve gotten all your life and just “Grow up and get serious!”

What’s happening here is that you’re caught in what I call an Energy Trap.

Energy traps are well-worn patterns that have infused into your system over the course of your life through all of its triggers and dramas.

The patterns become a default. You just “go there.”  They feel like who you are!

So when you start a business”¦ you tend to make decisions from these unconscious places, rather than unraveling and de-fusing the pattern itself so you can find new ways of behaving. This unconscious behavior builds limiting walls around the success you can actually reach.

In my Defying Gravity” free video series, this particular pattern that we see in Paula is what’s known as the Flip-Flop Trap.  And it was the one pattern the participants most identified with.

Of course it is!  Part of being an entrepreneur is getting ideas!

But there’s a problem when you can’t follow through.

See if any of these symptoms sound like you:

• You have more than one business and/or certification. You have several businesses and you move from one thing to the next.

• You’re always acting on many different ideas. No sooner does one idea get to the point where you’re starting to make traction, you self-sabotage and move onto the next idea.

• Secretly, you feel shame. This shame is terrifying and deeply saddening. And it’s so hard for you to share.

On the surface, the obvious advice is that you should “Focus already!” Or “Grow up!”

And you’ve probably tried just that. But it rarely works for long. It only makes for more shame, and then you’re caught in the trap once again.

So instead, let’s start by setting an intention to shift the pattern.

You have to dig deeper.  And yes, I know. When you’ve got that entrepreneurial spirit, it can be hard to sit the hell down and make some space. But that’s what’s called for here.

This is uncomfortable.  Which is precisely what you are avoiding when you’re caught in the Flip-Flop Trap”¦Discomfort.

Think about it. Once a business gets rolling, there’s some tedious stuff to focus on. Each time you grab for a new idea or direction, you’re not actually going for some great new idea. You’re simply avoiding discomfort yet again.

This is why you’re never ultimately fulfilled.

Because discomfort is part of the process of expanding into a successful business.

And it’ll continue to be!

Here’s a radical, totally woo-woo way of looking at it. (And this way of thinking happens to be what’s made me successful”¦)

Your business is really just a vessel for your own expansion. (For your soul’s expansion.) 

That means – in this particular pattern -  most likely, your soul is trying desperately to get you to face the discomfort of sticking with one idea through to the end.  Through the tedious, through the mistakes, through the hiring of your first person, even through success.

When you look at it this way, you might be able to see beyond just the usual advice to “grow up.” Instead, you’ll understand that you are growing FROM this dream or idea you got.  It’s about expansion.

How do you work through this?  It takes time.  And more than that, it takes self-awareness.  (Most people don’t want self-awareness. They just want a quick fix and promises of instant money.)

So choose one of your ideas and be willing to stick it out.

Make your motivation be about BECOMING and OVERCOMING.  Not about succeeding in order to prove that, by God, you’re okay.  The motivation changes the entire game.

After that, it’s about having a framework for keeping yourself aligned and on track with your focus and personal power.  (This is exactly what I teach in my Becoming360 program that’s rolling along right now!)

Hey, if you made it this far in the article, this topic must mean something to you!  Share with me in the comments what you tend to do with new ideas. Do you jump all over them and then lose the momentum? Or have you learned to deal with this pattern and find a better way?  Share share share share share.