We often hear the phrase “do it scared” when it comes to doing amazing things like building a business. Still, fear in the body often leads to dysregulation, which makes you operate on autopilot for self-preservation, presenting a part of you that may look and sound like you but a robotic version that is more instinctive than creative. When we’re not being creative, we exist outside of our personality and our calling. We don’t want to do that. To build the most authentic and fulfilling life, we must be able to engage and live within what we are made to do, the mission that we can unearth, and present it to the world wholeheartedly. But all of this takes practice.
While I understand the meaning of do it scared, I propose that we instead “Do It Cared.” I offer that using self-care as the foundation for our work and audacious undertakings will make it so that what we put into the world is filled with the beautiful things intrinsically within us as we uncover them. Many of us have mistakenly thought of self-care as an individual and consumerist approach but for real results, it has little to do with isolation or spending but instead building a system and practice of taking care of ourselves so that eventually, the care that we give ourselves catches up to us and fortifies us as we are in pursuit of the thing that we are trying to birth.
Why does it matter to your brand strategy that you take care of yourself? To brand well, you have to have access to your innermost inspiration, which, without intentional intervention, is often masked or interrupted in favor of survival. Being the founder or CEO of a business is hard. It requires a great deal of learning and growing; for better or worse, this can be stressful, and as we’re building, we will most certainly encounter a series of interrupters – things that try to throw us off of our game, make us believe that we are not enough, or try to skew our growing self-perception so that we stop in our tracks instead of pushing forward in pursuit of the bigger vision. In Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art,” he refers to a similar concept called resistance. I use the term interrupters because sometimes, it’s a person, a social ideal, the status quo, something that is or feels tangible holding up a stop sign, interrupting our flow, and making us rethink whether or not this is for us.
Having a business offers our audience the gift of transformation and the biggest way to stand out and become authoritative within our industries is obviously to be the expert that you are and tell the inspired, wholehearted stories that brought you here. This requires courage and honesty that only comes from care and different kinds of care for the new levels of success and trials that you will encounter, especially as someone doing something different. Your calling might rattle other people who will in turn try to rattle you. Shoot, it might rattle you all by yourself, but if it’s in you, it’s leading to some change that you are meant to make, but that doesn’t happen if you do not engage yourself, take the time to know and care for yourself in the trials and failures that come with trying to build something that changes lives. Crafting original work and authentically expressing your unique talents can be incredibly challenging, particularly if your natural abilities have been suppressed or diminished, often due to the pursuit of comfort, external perceptions of what constitutes safety, and the avoidance of risk.
I hope that we do more than just face our fears and as we press into the future that we are creating. It’s not only about putting our work out there and crossing our fingers. I’m talking about really taking care of ourselves, especially in the times that feel particularly hard, getting through the good times and the tough ones with a bit of Grit, Grace & Gratitude. It’s about celebrating when things go right, learning from when they don’t, and handling everything that comes our way with an eye towards purpose. This way, we’re not just moving forward but growing and caring for ourselves through it all.
Do It Cared.
