498: Keeping Fear From Controlling You
Brought to you by: Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
Is fear holding you back in your pet care business? In this episode, we delve into the various types of fears business owners face and why addressing them is crucial for success. We discuss the physical and cognitive effects of fear, from the fight-or-flight response to avoidance behaviors, and provide strategies for overcoming these challenges through education and preparation. Building a support system and developing practical steps to manage fear are highlighted as essential tools for growth. Learn how to keep fear from controlling your business and empower yourself to achieve your goals.
Main topics:
Types of Fear
Effects of Fear
Importance of Preparation
Build your support system
Find your ‘Why’
Main takeaway: Find the one thing that will keep you moving when fear tries to keep you from your goal
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
fear, clients, pet sitters, business, pet, decision, learn, prepared, unforeseen events, business owners, dog, associates, happen, situation, control, tense, steps, focus, practiced, biggest fears
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:00
Hi, I'm Meghan.
Collin 00:02
I'm Collin,
Meghan 00:03
and we are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you also to our sponsor, pet sitters Associates, and our lovely Patreon supporters, who have found value in the show at almost 500 episodes, we are appreciative of their contribution. If you, too, have found a few episodes that you've enjoyed and want to keep the show going, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help
Collin 00:31
out. And the biggest thing there is share an episode with a friend. If you know of a pet sitter or business owner who you think would benefit from the episode, share it with them. The
Meghan 00:40
world is a scary place, especially as a business owner, there are lots of different fears that we can have. Some are small. Some are very big. It could be for getting a poop bag on a walk or maybe missing a visit entirely. These things happen. A little bit of anxiety comes. And this is just it happens. It's part of the job, but we can do things to try to mitigate this, and that's what we're going to talk about today.
Collin 01:04
Yeah, fear is a huge motivating factor for us as business owners, and there are a lot of different types of fears. There's the fear of failure, right? Worrying about losing clients due to an error that you did or didn't make, or maybe not being able to sustain the business through your own actions or decisions. Maybe fear of change, a resistance to adopting new technologies or altering your business strategies due to changing forecasts of the economy or changing dynamics of the people that you're actually serving. Fear of rejection is a huge one. It's about approaching new clients, or going into introducing yourself to new business owners, or even receiving negative feedback from clients or staff. Then there's the fear of the unknown, worrying about new business trends, regulations, unforeseen events, things that are completely outside of your control and you don't even know what to stress about because you don't even know enough to stress about.
Meghan 01:57
It could also be you're fearing conflict. We don't like having the hard conversations with clients or with employees. Maybe you have FOMO anxiety about not attending industry events or conferences, or keeping up with competitors or missing out on a new coaching challenge or a trend or a person. There are so many fears that can hold us back in our business. An
Collin 02:20
interesting one is about fear of responsibility, and it kind of leads into a little bit of fear of success, but this is where you don't want to try something new because of the stuff that it puts on your plate. That if you actually do get the 10x clients that you wanted and that you were expecting or you were hoping for from your new marketing push, if you actually get those new clients now, you have to manage a larger client base, or now that puts you in a position where you have to hire and so we can sometimes kneecap ourselves from success because we know that there's still more work on the other side.
Meghan 02:52
You just said, it kneecaps us. But that really is true. Fear can ultimately limit us, and that's why we should be concerned about this. We don't want fear to be the driving factor in our business, if we do something because we are so scared of something else, or we don't do something fully enough at 100% because, oh, I'm only going to give 80% to this thing because I'm so afraid of the other 20% that I may get too many clients, or I may make somebody mad, or the personal implications of doing this, it really keeps us from doing what we need to do to survive or change our business. Yeah,
Collin 03:28
it can arrest us right where we stand. You mentioned about, oh, I'm only gonna put 80% effort into this. Well, we may do that if we are concerned about the feedback we make it, or we're not confident in ourself or in our ability to actually pull this off. So we're going to kind of half heartedly talk about this when we're introducing ourselves to other business owners, or when the client calls us and they ask us about a brand new service that we're trying to offer. If we don't have the confidence to back that up, we're not going to have the conviction to sell that to them or talk to them about that. And experiencing fear is a multifaceted approach. There are so many components to this. There's the physical aspect, and this is one where most of us have some sort of connection to this. This is the fight or flight response, right? This is where fear triggers our response of running away. It dumps adrenaline and cortisol. It increases our heart rate, our breathing increases. We get heightened senses all around us as our body physically prepares to run away from danger. And along with this, we get tense, right? This is why we can our the yoga instructor talks about having shoulder earrings, where our shoulders are so tensed and height, because as that anxiety is, that stress, that fear comes in, our muscles tense up and it's gonna be across your body. You can clench your jaw. Can it hurt your teeth, sweating, shaking. It can cause excessive amounts of these or trembling. If you've ever had a phone call with somebody that was rather tense and you put the phone down and you're kind of shaking a little bit, this was part of that fight or flight response, where your body is physically responding to this. And
Meghan 04:58
for us introverts, this happens. Every time we go into a new business or we go to a networking event, we introduce ourselves, and our voice is shaking. It's definitely that fight or flight kicking in of, oh, I don't want to be here. I'm very nervous. I would just want to run away right now.
Collin 05:12
Then there's the cognitive side of this one, and this is the one that honestly keeps a lot of people awake at night, things like racing thoughts, an overwhelming flow of thoughts, almost uncontrollably, where we are focusing on the worst case scenarios or those potential dangers, which actually distracts us from the concentrating on the work that we need to be doing, or making the decisions that are before us right here and now. And that's just catastrophizing. What this is you hear, Oh, they're just catastrophizing. What this is, is where you are, you're anticipating and you're magnifying the potential problems before you where you see situations and all you do is see them for worse than they actually are. And what happens then is you go, Well, I if I do this thing, everybody dies. Well, in that case, I'm not going to make that decision. So I'm paralyzed in this process. This happens a lot. We were just playing our daughter with chess recently, and she was so paralyzed with not wanting to make a move that she knew she had to do, but she knew that I would take the pawn or the rook or whatever, but she didn't want to lose that, so she didn't make a decision, and she just kind of equivocated around and never advanced the game, it stops us where we are. Now, there is
Meghan 06:24
a point to be said for knowing the decision tree that needs to be made of if I make this choice, then this might happen, and this and this and these consequences that fall out because of this. So there is a point where you do need to be thinking about your decisions that you're making, but to really try to stick to the facts on this and go, Okay, I'm not gonna use my emotion. I'm not gonna say everybody dies at the end of this, or my business shuts down and all my clients leave me try to stick with the most logical conclusions for the end of this, and then don't dwell on it. Move on quickly after you've run through the scenarios. Yeah,
Collin 06:56
that's just being prudent. That's just being wise in your process, because everything that we do will have an impact. There's always a consequence to things that we do, both positive and negative. When we talk about catastrophizing, this is where our brain always goes to magnifying the potential problems, and all we can think about are the bad or worst possible outcomes that could come from that. Then there's also the impact to our memory, and this is a growing body of research whereby fear can actually impact our not just our ability to think and make decisions, but also make it harder to recall information and to think clearly during stressful situations well. And
Meghan 07:35
this actually makes total sense, because if you are in fight or flight, you're not going to be thinking about, Oh, I need to remember these five details. You're just gonna go. I need to run now. So this makes total sense. Our brains, when we are in a very stressful or fearful situation, we can only think about a couple things because that's all we can focus on, and everything else gets shunted to later, or I'm never gonna remember that. Yeah,
Collin 07:57
when the cocktail of hormones hits our bloodstream to prepare our bodies to leave, to increase our heart rate, to increase our breathing rate, to tense our muscles, all of that diverts from our higher cognitive abilities to recall information Absolutely. And we find this a lot in people and in sitters who come into situations, who come into visits already stressed. And what do they do? They have a hard time remembering the details. They have a hard time remembering what time did I start this visit? This is a classic example of you look at your phone, you read the notes, and your heart rate's a little bit elevated because you're nervous. It's your first time there. And this client was a little touchy on the phone, and you're not sure what's going on. Wait, what time was trash day? Did they get medications today? Well, I just read that information. Let me read it again, all based out of this fear response that we have by being in that new situation. And unfortunately, another aspect of fear that can manifest in our cognitive is that this can lead to persistent and unwanted thoughts that are difficult to control, all actually really almost always centered around an object or the situation causing the fear. So we are obsessively focused on that dog getting away from us, or we're obsessively focused on that dog lashing out and biting us, even though there's no obvious signs that that's going to happen, all our brain can do is, don't get bit, don't get bit, don't get bit, don't get bit, don't get bit. So every situation starts to be this dog's about to bite me. And so we change our behavior, and we don't do the things that we need to do, running our business.
Meghan 09:35
Well, I was even gonna say locking the door. Did I lock the door? Did I actually lock the door? Am I sure I locked the door? I'm so focused on locking the door that maybe I'm not focused on other things, or I've convinced myself that I definitely did not lock the door, even though I remember myself locking the door, but did I actually lock the door? And because of that, fear can really change our emotional and behavioral modes. One of those is avoidance. We don't want to do this thing. At all. We steer clear of situations or people or activities that trigger this fear because we don't want to feel that fear at all. It can limit opportunities and hinder our growth, our personal our professional growth, and potentially make us angry and irritable. We may perceive threats or stressors and not want to deal with them and become pretty bad at communication. If there are certain clients that are helicopter clients, and you fear every time that you walk into their their home, that they're going to talk to you through the camera and on the counter, there's a big, long list of things they've written for you to do in the 30 minutes you have, you can really start to feel that fear well up inside of you, and you're not a very nice person, and you may send a terse update when it should have been nice,
Collin 10:46
or think of it as, oh, the last time I went down that road, or I took that route, there was a massive accident, and I was 35 minutes late to my visit and throughout my entire night. So I'm never going to go down that road again. I'm going to avoid that, and it can lead us to changing our entire behavior when it actually would be beneficial for us to go down that road. And then we can become angry that we can't go down that road, even though we put ourselves in that situation to begin with.
Meghan 11:12
Yeah, a lot of times I equate it to PTSD, especially when we're dealing with hires and people that have left us for whatever reason, and I have that moment of oh, is this? Is this person going to do the same thing that the other person did? It's these triggers that I know caused me to be irritable that
Collin 11:28
is actually a long term impact that can result of chronic exposure to fear and stress. Is that these are triggering a reminder of this past trauma, because that's actually what that is. You might not, you know, I might not think this, but your physiological response to that email ping on your phone, when you get that alert that that's actually trauma, it's a trauma trigger where your heart rate elevates and your blood pressure increases and your breathing rate increases and your muscles tense. That's a fight or flight response to fear. And just like Megan said, we've had some really nasty emails come through from former staff, from from former clients of ours, or potential clients, just ripping us up one side down the other. And now, whenever an email pings, it can cause our heart rate to elevate. That's trauma, right? And it can also be accompanied by flashbacks, nightmares and severe emotional distress because of those previous experiences, and that can lead to withdrawal from social interactions again, this kind of avoidance thing, where we want to because we feel lonely, because we feel isolated, we then, in turn, decrease our access to other people, and We stop attending these things that we once did, because we don't feel like we're worthy of that, and we don't feel like others are there to support us in our own life.
Meghan 12:49
But there are things that we can do about this. We have been Debbie downers for a few minutes now, but there are ways to overcome this fear. Not fear, not exactly pun intended. But before we get to that, we'd like to that, we'd like to tell you about our friends at pet sitters associates, as pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, and that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help. For over 20 years, they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote at pets@llc.com you can get a discount when joining by clicking membership Pet Sitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and insurance. Once again at pets@llc.com the first way that we can overcome fear is by education and preparation. These are key things, continuous learning, investing that time and learning about new pet care techniques, business management skills, industry trends, listening to audiobooks, podcast, reading actual physical books, going to conferences, attending workshops. These are all things that are going to keep you well informed, ready to tackle challenges that arise, because when you are prepared, you can't be prepared for everything, but when, when you are prepared, you can be more confident stepping into situations. Maybe you're going to create detailed plans and contingency strategies. A lot of people in Florida have hurricane plans. Here in the Midwest, we have tornado emergency plans. When you have strategies. It can mitigate that fear by providing clear steps to follow in a variety of scenarios. Again, you cannot be prepared for everything, but when you regularly update your knowledge and you stay prepared, it can help you feel more in control. That's what we want. We want businesses that we can control. That's why we are not employees of some other company. We are the CEOs. We are the bosses. We want to be in control as much as we possibly can and not very anxious.
Collin 14:45
Yeah, and a lot of this flows from the fear of being inadequate, or a feeling of inadequacy, of not really knowing what's going on. So by this is where we listen to that fear, and we go, okay, this is telling me something. This is telling me I. About myself that I need to listen to for just a moment and see where is this coming from. Why is this fear here? And if I feel inadequate, and I have these fears and anxieties about what I would do in a hurricane, what can I learn to help alleviate that? What kind of plans can I put into place? Who can I talk to to work through that. So at the end of the day, when those fears start to bubble up again, I can reach over, I can pull the hurricane preparedness plan off of the desk and put it down, and I can actually read through it, and I can know it's right here, and I've rehearsed it so that when fear kicks in, because here's the other thing we just mentioned, that when fear kicks in, our cognitive ability to make decisions and recall information plummets through the roof because we're getting ready to run away for our lives. So how in the world can we trust ourselves to act appropriately in
15:49
those situations, practice and rehearsal and more practice and more rehearsal,
Collin 15:55
so that by the time the emergency happens, if and honestly when it does, you have this muscle memory of in the situation. I do, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it's not on me, because I've practiced it so much. Talk to any emergency preparedness individual, or talk to any first responder about how they get go, go through those those motions, and how they work those scenes, and when they come upon they don't know what's going on. They've practiced so much it's almost on autopilot. Yeah, it's
Meghan 16:25
that visualization. When you do that, it can help reframe your mindset from one of fear to one of confidence and readiness. Of I can do this. I have prepared. I know the steps that I need to take when we do this regular visualization of these things, we can have a more positive outcome, a more positive scenario that is going to feel less daunting and more attainable
Collin 16:49
through those affirmations of because I've practiced, because I've learned, say it, I am capable. I am capable to handle this challenge. I am capable of taking care of my clients through a hurricane or through a fire or through whatever. But it all starts by breaking these down into these small action steps, things that you can actually attain as you look at that larger goal of okay, I need to learn about hurricane preparedness. What's my first step? What's my second step? These manageable things, because the other thing about fear is, as we start thinking about worst case scenarios, we can catastrophize our process of learning as well. Of it's too big. There's nothing I can do. It's out of my league. I'm not capable of doing that by breaking it down into little, manageable steps. We actually can convince ourselves that they are and each small success actually starts to build what build our confidence and momentum over time as well,
Meghan 17:48
well and take the scenario that every pet sitter fears the most is missing a visit. Okay, you have a 6am visit. What can you do to mitigate missing that visit? You can set multiple alarms, and then when you wake up at 430 and fear that you're missing the visit and, oh, I don't want to go back to sleep because I'm going to miss the alarm, you're going to go, No, I know that I have prepared myself. I have four different alarms. My significant other knows that I need to be up at this time so they can also alert me if I miss the alarms. I have these steps in place. I have software that's going to alert me. I have these things that I know are going to be helpful to me, and so I can confidently fall back asleep, because I have already prepared.
Collin 18:34
Yeah, you're developing those skills and that system around you, and that may be a great place to start as you have these fears. Because, again, these, these, these fears, don't come from no anywhere. They don't come from out of nowhere. They come from a source. And it's our job, your job, to pinpoint where it's coming from and why it's there. And if it is that you're feeling like there's a lack of skills, there's you don't have that, start to develop those. Start to work on those and trust your experience as well, trust the things that you have done, and write those down. This is one of the main reasons why, when we talk about putting together policies and procedures and SOPs, why it's so critical for even solopreneurs to do so that you can trust yourself, that you know what you're doing because you've written it down that when you start to feel a lack of self confidence about your ability, point to those policies, point to those procedures that you put in place from your experience and the learning that you've done through attending conferences and the people that you've talked to, so that you can point back to that one
Meghan 19:34
of my biggest fears in both life and business is things outside of My control, which is actually most things in life, because we can really only control ourselves. We can't control how other people react to the things that we say. I mean, we could be kind with our words, but ultimately, we're not responsible for how they take things. We are in control of our policies and procedures, but we aren't in control of how clients treat us or the things. Is that they ask of us. And so my biggest fear really manifests itself because we have employees, and I can't control what they do. Sometimes they're not available, sometimes they don't do the job as well as I would have liked. And so knowing that we have policies and procedures that can always be amended, we're always adding things, we can always train them better and on new things. And so when these uncontrolled things happen, I remind myself that there is a greater purpose in this, that our mission, vision, goals, values for our company, are ultimately going to be fulfilled, and that I can learn a lesson from everything that happens. And so when I focus on the bigger picture, the little things that may irritate me or get under my skin don't seem as bad, because I know that ultimately we can make a better company based off of these lessons that we've learned, and that the these trials will happen, but greater success is going to come from them. I
Collin 20:58
know one of my biggest fears is in making the one decision that will ruin everything, whether that's with a hire or taking on a client or saying no to something, or moving forward with a service, or writing ad copy for something, just knowing that I fear of being one decision away from ruining it all. And one thing that really helps me through this is actually having a really great support system, and having Megan remind me of all the other decisions that I've made that have actually paid off and have actually been really beneficial. Being connected to other business owners who can speak into my life and say, Hey, you're actually running a pretty cool business, and you're doing this really cool stuff, and we love the things that we're seeing what we're doing. So being part of that community of other people who can understand where I'm coming from and understand that same fear and actually help boost me up when I'm feeling really down or I'm feeling really concerned about these big things that are coming up, because I tend to avoid them entirely. And I'll just archive the email again so that I don't see it. Just shuffle it off my plate, so I don't have to make that decision because I'm worried about screwing it up. And so whether you are looking for a support system, whether that's in a broader community that's local online, whether that's in our sitter confessionals group, or whether you go after actually a mentor or a coach, someone who can come alongside you and work with you on your specific issues and your specific concerns, to reassure you with directed, practical advice from their own experiences, whatever that is, I think that having a support system is really beneficial, especially as we work through the fears that we have,
Meghan 22:35
because it's not going to be very helpful if you wake up at 3am every morning stressing about What you're going to do for the next day, or stressing about the fears that may or may not happen in your business, and you don't have anybody to talk about it with or share it with or bounce ideas off of. Have you ever dealt with this? How did you work through it? Or maybe you can just brainstorm, and they can pour into you what they see and how they think you can help yourself. Support
Collin 23:01
groups are also really important for helping you celebrate your successes through acknowledgement and recognition. Regularly acknowledging and celebrating your achievements, no matter how small, will help boost your confidence and motivate you to keep moving forward. It actually helps reinforce those positive behaviors, those changes that you're trying to make, and so that you can look back and see the progress that you've made, which ultimately makes you more resilient to fear because you know how you've worked through it in the past, whether you have someone to help you through this or not recognize your progress, because it will help you shift your focus from what you haven't done or what you are worried about to What you've actually achieved into what you've actually worked hard towards to help build a stronger, more confident mindset over time. We've talked about a lot of things, but practically, what do we do with this? Well, it all starts with your risk management. Know how much you can tolerate and how much you are willing to accept into your business, how much risk a great thing to look into for this is having clear and concise, detailed contracts that will protect both you and your clients really here, helping to reduce misunderstandings and potential conflicts. Because if we have a fear about of a client disrespecting us, or we have a fear about of a client saying bad things or not doing what they were supposed to do. Put it in writing so that you can if there is a conflict, you can point back to the black and white piece of paper and say, This is what you agreed to, having clearly defined terms and conditions will set expectations and provide a framework for handling any issues have a conflict resolution part of your contract. What processes do you go through? What evidence will you accept? And defining terms is so important. We see this a lot on Facebook groups. Of my client is mad at me because I left for X number of hours, but nothing was ever clearly defined about. What their pet care looked like, what they're in home sitting included, how many hours of care did it actually get the client? So that when somebody has a question, you can point again back to what they agreed to and what you have in writing, and also having insurance if you have a fear of people suing you and having financial obligations beyond which you could afford, have comprehensive pet care insurance that will give you peace of mind in that financial protection in case of accidents or those unforeseen events. If you're constantly worried about the fire or about the dog getting out, or about damage happening from a stressed out dog and worrying about if, maybe if you board in your home and you're worried about the dogs destroying things, make sure you have the proper insurance to cover those, and regularly reviewing and updating your insurance policies is crucial so you have adequate protection for the services you actually provide. If, over the last year, you've added pet taxi, or you've added more grooming, or you've added whatever service, it makes sure you have that insurance to cover that so that you don't have to worry about those possible things that can come up. I
Meghan 26:04
think a lot of this comes down to two things. One, writing things down, so that you can cover your butt in any scenario, and it'll give you peace of mind. And then the second thing is to know yourself, to know how you deal with stress, how you deal with fear, because everybody deals with it differently. Maybe you're just gonna run away and avoid it. Maybe you're gonna confront it head on, but maybe you're shaking and you'll be a little irritable. Not everyone is gonna deal with these things the same way, so maybe that looks like for you, meditation or yoga or exercise, and not just walking your clients dogs, but maybe exercise in a different way, maybe wakeboarding or swimming or some other physical thing that you can do with your body that's not just walking dogs. This job is mentally taxing, so maybe you just sit and breathe. That's okay, too, if that's how you deal with fear and stress, and you block everything out of your mind and you just focus on the here and now. And if a thought comes to your mind, you tell it not now, finding
Collin 27:01
the motivation to push through the fear is the biggest struggle. So take one step at a time and find something that makes you move, that makes you decide, that makes you push through the fear. I know for us, our kids are the biggest factor in our life, when something scary comes up when something, when an email, pops up that I don't want to deal with. I know that at the end of the day, I have to deal with that email for the benefit of our kids, because it impacts our business and our ability to provide a life for them, whatever that is for you, find the thing that you have to push through the things to get through, keep the long term in mind, have that goal out there, because at the end of the day, we don't want to sit and regret letting the fearful thing that happened at 9am on a Tuesday keep us from that long term goal that we want. Because that goal is worth it. Whatever that is for you, it's worth pushing through the fear. It's worth pushing through the scary things that come up. It's worth the effort that goes into all of the planning, all of the education, all of the policies, all of the team, all of the support, all of the mental
28:15
work that's worth it. Find that thing for you. So think
Meghan 28:20
about how you handle your fears in your personal or business life. Are they holding you back from things that you want to achieve and goals you want to set? If you'd like to share those with other pet sitters and dog walkers and how you've overcome those you can email us at feedback at petsitter confessional.com thank you for joining us today and listening to this. We also want to thank pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode, we will talk with you next time bye. You.
