Face Your Fears with Sarah B. Rawz

You don’t want to be THAT person.

The one who freezes halfway through a big speech.

The one who steps up on stage and bombs.

Much better to be in the audience watching from a safe distance, right?

None of us like uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

We don’t want to put ourselves in a vulnerable position.

We remember from childhood what it felt like to get laughed at or shamed for messing up.

But you know and I know what happens when we avoid risk…

We never step up on that stage.

We never put ourselves out there. We never claim our chance to shine.

Business and empowerment coach Sarah B. Rawz helps her clients achieve their dreams by leaning into discomfort.

Everything worth doing involves discomfort.

It’s not comfortable to do something you’ve never done before. It’s not comfortable to own your mistakes. It’s not comfortable to grow and learn.

But that’s what successful people do.

In this week’s YBTV interview, you’ll learn how radical acceptance can help you make peace with being uncomfortable.

You’ll learn why pain and struggle don’t mean you’re going in the wrong direction.

And you’ll find out what leaning into discomfort can teach you about living your biggest, baddest life.

Join the Bigger Badder Crew

What You’ll Learn

When you think about what’s keeping you back from achieving your goals, you might think that what you really need is some encouragement.

So you go to an empowerment coach who tells you, “You can do it! You’re awesome! Believe in yourself!”

Which feels great until you go home….

And those encouraging words fade into the darkness…

Where all the fears and insecurities and worries come back louder than before.

Sarah B. has a different approach.

She coaches into the discomfort.

She tells her clients straight-up that working with her is going to be uncomfortable. They’re going to face that sticky stuff head-on. It’ll be tough, but that doesn’t mean it won’t include some joy and laughter along the way.

Face the Fear

“People often come into coaching wanting me to show them where the switch is” to turn off their discomfort, Sarah B. says.

They want to make their fears disappear. They don’t want to look at those fears more closely.

But avoiding fear just makes it worse.

“Our fear likes to hang out in front of funhouse mirrors that are not very fun,” she says. “Our sense of fear becomes distorted, and the fangs seem longer and the claws seem sharper.”

That’s why it’s so important to face the fear directly.

By looking directly at [fear], we get to really explore [questions like] how long are these claws, actually? How sharp are these things, actually? Can I battle this fear? The answer is almost always yes.”

Are your fears just in your head? Or do they have some merit?

Often, there is a grain of truth in what we fear. Failure is a possibility. You might flop. But what does that actually mean?

“Most of the time the actual fallout, the actual danger, is pretty minimal,” Sarah B. says.

What hurts us the most is the way we feel when we’re confronted with failure.

And we can cope with those feelings.

“We can move through emotional stuff. We’ve moved through every bit of emotional discomfort that we’ve experienced so far in our lives. We can do it again.”

No Achievement without Struggle

If you fail at something, if you hit roadblocks, if you keep on struggling…

Then maybe you weren’t meant to do it after all?

Surely, if the universe intended you to start that business or write that book, the way would be made smooth.

This idea that struggle is a sign of being on the wrong path makes us give up before we can break through.

Sarah B. recommends a simple lesson taught by Zen teacher Shinzen Young:

Pain x Resistance = Suffering

“Nowhere in this equation do we expect pain to go away,” she says. “Pain is presupposed. There is no life without pain.”

Knowing this, the one variable we have under our control is resistance.

We can stop resisting the discomfort we’re experiencing.

We do this through radical acceptance.

“The opportunity here is to accept that it is going to be uncomfortable,” Sarah B. explains. “This is acceptance in the form of, ‘I don’t like this, and I’m accepting that I don’t like this.’ ‘I don’t want this, and I’m accepting that I don’t want this.'”

We waste so much energy resisting discomfort. Once we accept that this is where we are, and it is awful, and we don’t have to enjoy it, we can redirect our energy towards finding a way through.

The Moment Time Froze

Sarah B. knows this from experience.

When she was giving a TEDx talk, with 100 people in the audience and more watching the livestream, she blanked.

Completely blanked.

“I mean, nothing,” she says. “Not a word, not a thought, not an idea.”

What was she going to do? How could she save this situation?

“I said, ‘Well, this is my moment, you guys. I don’t know what I was going to say next.’ All I could do was own it. And the most beautiful thing happened…”

She could feel the audience right there in that moment with her.

She could feel them holding their breath with her.

She could feel them rooting for her.

The cameraman yelled, “We love your shoes!”

And she found herself again.

Everyone laughed. She kicked up her red stilettoes. She picked up at the last place she could remember and just kept going.

“That was a really horrifying and beautiful experience,” she remembers.

“To me, that’s the nature of discomfort: that it can be horrifying and beautiful at the same time.”

The Bigger Badder Crew

Today, Sarah B. continues to coach clients to lean into their discomfort and create the life and business of their dreams.

She also offers a live online gathering each week for anyone who wants to join.

Her Bigger Badder Crew meets virtually each Wednesday for a “Chomp and Chat,” where people can eat their lunch and hang out together on Zoom.

Want to join Sarah B’s newsletter list and become part of the Bigger Badder Crew? Sign up here!