SHINING YOUR LIGHT – PROMOTE YOURSELF WITH EASE

How to Promote Yourself with Ease

You’ve got enormous amount of talent – everyone tells you how gifted you are, you’ve got numerous qualifications/letters after your name, you’ve trained in something dear to your heart – but you’re not doing anything with any of them.

Or you have an idea to start working for yourself or to go off in a new direction and to stop being a wage slave for someone else who doesn’t even appreciate what you’re doing for them?

You know what you want to do, but you can’t do anything. In fact you’re terrified to death of doing anything. You’re literally frozen. Because you know you’re going have to go out there and promote yourself. And that’s a huge stretch.

THAT QUOTE!
You’ve seen this quote by Marianne Williamson hundreds or times and it still gets to you.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Marianne Williamson

WHY YOU’RE HIDING YOUR LIGHT
Because you know you’re hiding your light? You know you’re playing small, and shrinking has become such a habit – like any drug it’s hard to give it up. You’ve never known quite how to promote yourself.

And there’s all sorts of reasons you’re hiding your light. You’re afraid you might fail. You’re afraid you’ll get in a financial mess (or you’re already in a financial mess and can’t see a way out of it). You’re afraid that everyone will think you’re a big fraud. But perhaps you’re like a lot of people, you’re afraid of being seen.

And so you hoard. You hide away and your hoard, like any miser, you hold onto what you’ve got, afraid that if you let it go you’ll lose everything.

And it is daunting, no doubt about it – moving into the light, really allowing yourself to be seen, taking those brave steps into the unknown. I’ve been and done all those things I’ve described so far. I’ve hidden away. I’ve be

YOU ARE NOT YOUR FEAR

But I know too, I am not my fear. As I’ve said before, often fear is not fear at all. It’s just the first thing that shows up when you start on a new path – when you dare to break out of our box and start to do something different.

This is an excerpt from a previous newsletter:

“Fear is powerful. The fact that fear is not real in most cases, makes it no less powerful. Fear can grip you around the heart, paralyse you, run you into the ground and make all action impossible. Most of the things we fear are inside our heads, that produce similar physical sensations as if we were facing a raging bear. I know what it is to feel this emotion. Fear has gripped me many times. I have known its paralyses and seductions.

However in his book, The War of Art, Steven Pressfield tells us that FEAR IS GOOD.

“Like self doubt fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to have to do. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.”

So the way to go with fear is towards it, (and I am not of course talking about the fear that protects us from real dangers). Going towards fear is at first terrifying, but as everyone who knows who has bungee jumped or sky dived, going through your fear threshold can be enormously exhilarating.

And traveling through that barrier for something that calls to you at the deepest level, is hugely fulfilling and facilitates the emergence of a totally new self. The old skin falls away effortlessly, along with the limitations that went with it. Life can never be quite the same again.

What I have found that has worked for me, is to “feel the fear”: to become acquainted with it.