Fear, when misunderstood, is quietly debilitating.
When I began my coaching practice, something became obvious very quickly:
The business and personal challenges people struggled
with were almost always fear in disguise.
When advisers feel stuck – struggling to attract clients, to grow their practice, to make a decision or a transition – it’s rarely because they don’t know what to do.
Lack of information is almost never the problem
If you want to know how to run better client meetings, improve sales, or scale up, Google has more advice than you could ever use.
Michael Gerber, author of ‘The E-Myth Revisited‘, captured this perfectly:
“Why is it that with all the information available today on how to be successful in small business, so few people really are?”
It almost always comes back to misunderstood fear.
Where does fear show up for you?
If you pause for a moment, notice an area of your own professional life where fear shows up. Not always loudly, but persistently:
*Fear of rejection.
*Fear of making a mistake.
*Fear of being judged.
*Fear of saying the wrong thing to a prospect.
*Fear of raising fees.
*Fear of changing direction.
Fear distorts our thinking. The imagination fills in the blanks with worst-case scenarios.
And because fear can feel so real and intense, we either make poor decisions to try and escape it or we slide into inaction because ‘it’s not the right time.” Or something similar.
Fear and Financial Planning
None of us are immune from fear and neither are our clients.
If your work is to help people make intelligent life decisions and plan for a future that matters to them, then your ability to see past your own fears is part of your professional toolkit.
When you’ve confronted your own thinking patterns, you naturally bring more calm, humility, and clarity into client conversations.
It takes your work beyond technical solutions because you model what clear thinking looks like under pressure.
This is incredibly helpful to clients because they feel reassured, more trusting, and your advice lands with greater impact.
Undestanding the impersonal nature of thought
All of us will experience fear. But the fear isn’t the real issue. Fear becomes pervasive when we take it personally.
A fearful thought arises:
“What if the client says no.”
“I’m not good at business development.”
“I’ll mess this up.”
If we treat those thoughts as a description of reality, we quickly spiral into limiting beliefs and anxious feelings.
But fearful thoughts are not reality. They’re a made-up reality in the moment. The conventional approach to fear often makes things worse because we treat fear as something real that needs managing, fixing, or battling.
This is like sleeping with a baseball bat to fight the monster under the bed.
How the human system works
The truth is that thought and feeling are inseparable. You have a thought – and you feel it. That’s how all feelings are created.
When we forget this, we start reacting to feelings as if they are information about our life, our future, or our ability.
They’re not. They’re temporary experiences created by thought.
So, what is there to do?
There’s nothing to fix. Just seeing fear for what it is.
A feeling created by thought in the moment. It’s natural to get caught by fearful thinking from time to time – thoughts can be vivid and convincing. But with real understanding of how the mind works, something shifts.
I’ve seen advisers carry fears for years – about getting clients, lacking confidence, making the right decisions – and then, in a moment of clarity, those fears lose their grip. Nothing external changes. The thinking does.
And suddenly, they’re free to build the practice they’ve always wanted and known they were capable of building.
So, I’ll leave you with the question:
Without the fear, what would you do differently in your practice?
PS. How can your relationship with money hold you back? Click here.
