In this episode I share my experience and process for overcoming fear!  Starting and running a business can be scary but fear doesn't have to hold you back or stop you from achieving your goals.  Get inspiration to set BIG GOALS, motivation to TAKE ACTION and application to GET RESULTS!

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey everybody, thanks for being here today. In case you don't know me, I'm Don Mamone. I'm a hospitality veteran, I'm an artist, I'm also an entrepreneur. Today we're going to talk about a four letter word. No, no, not that four letter word. Today we're going to talk about fear and more importantly, we're going to talk about how to overcome fear to achieve your goals.

What is fear anyway? Fear at its base level is an emotion. Don't get me wrong, I understand it's a very powerful emotion. It can oftentimes feel paralyzing and something that you can't overcome but I guarantee, fear is something that you can move past so that you can achieve your goals. I want to tell you a story. I'm going to tell you a story about a time in my life where had I not been able to overcome fear, it would have changed the course of my entire future. It's 2007, I'd spent eight long years in hospitality. I say long years because of the hours. It's nights, it's weekends, it's holidays, it's whatever it takes to get the job done. I took a job at the corporate office largely nine to five Monday through Friday, and I suddenly found myself with an abundance of free time. So what did I do?

I picked up my camera. For two glorious years, I was working that job and photographing in my free time and I was loving everything about it right up until my project got canceled, unexpectedly. And here's the circumstance. I could either go back to the life that I knew or I could strike out this bold new path and I can become a photographer. See, what brings about fear are things that we don't expect, things that we can't control and oftentimes things that we can't understand. So I remember that that fear was overwhelming and almost paralyzing. So I sat down with my fiance, she's now my wife, business partner and the mother of my daughter and we made a list. We had a very long list of all the things that I was scared of and that were inducing that fear. As I started to talk to people in my life about it, I found that people were supportive, loving, caring, enthusiastic and those things were wonderful and I've now called those people my cheerleaders. That wasn't really helping me with the list or with the fear.

So it was then that I identified that I needed to find a group of people that had been through what I was about to go through. I call those people our trailblazers. A trailblazer is someone who has been through what you're about to go through. So I was about to start a business. I didn't know how to start a business. I didn't know how to run a business. And so my list spoke to a lot of the things that have to do with that.

So I reached out to people that had started and were currently running successful businesses. And when I sat down with those people and they looked at my list, they were able to say things like, "Don, when I was in that circumstance, I was just as fearful as you are and these are the ways that I was able to achieve that goal. These are the resources I used." And suddenly those things that I was afraid weren't quite as scary and so I could cross them off my list. So as you talk to your trailblazers, they're going to look at your list and they're going to provide you with action and experience. Here's the magic. As you cross those items off the list and it gets shorter and shorter and inevitably disappears, so does the fear. So let's recap. Hold dear the cheerleaders in your life that