I'm Scared To Put My Work Out There

Jay Topp, founder of Real Growth, answers on video. Transcript:

I'm scared to put my work out there into the world, and that's super understandable. There's something that takes a lot of courage to share your message with the world because essentially, you're there to expose yourself to the world, and there's no such thing as exposure without judgment. And the truth is, you will be judged by sharing your message. You will have hateful comments on your post. You will be ridiculed, potentially by the people who are closest to you in your life.

And that is what makes it so courageous to be a leader, to go first, to go into the unknown, to have the courage to say what is on your heart. That is why it's remarkable. If you look at human history, status was such an important part of survival, and doing anything that could essentially create any cause for a lack of status or to have your status challenged meant death.

If you were in a community and you spoke up and said something out of turn, you would be shunned from the community. It would affect your ability to get food and water, your ability to procreate. So how a fear of judgment is so heavily wired into the human psyche. And so today, when those constraints no longer exist, it's still kind of wired into our psyche in general.

So to expose yourself to the world, to have the courage to stand behind a message that is potentially counterintuitive or goes against common wisdom and understanding, invites challenges, invites people who will disagree with you, but it's also going to invite incredible support in equal measure. It's going to bring your people to you. And the truth is, if you don't have the courage to stand for anything, you're not going to attract much of an audience.

You're not going to attract much of a crowd. You're going to attract sort of mediocrity. But if you have the courage to expose yourself to the world, you'll meet and be connected with remarkable individuals. There's a really great quote from Carl Jung, and it's a story of him consoling a young alchemist, or it's a story he was telling of a young alchemist being consoled by an older alchemist, and he said, "If you do your work good and truthfully, long enough, unknown friends will come and find you." And I think about that quote a lot when it comes to authentic expression, is it's easy to tame ourselves to become something that we're not in order to fit in, to be liked, to be accepted, and we will attract people who are just doing the same.

But when we have the courage to put our heart on the line, to risk being judged, being exposed, we truly get to find the greatest clients, and it invites a real richness into not only our business, but our whole life and the way that we inhibit it.