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A lot of times when we are elevating and where you're doing better for ourselves it's very common to see that the circle around us changes. Because sometimes people don't elevate with us and that's okay.
Welcome to the Make Up Your Mind podcast. I'm your host Jahleane Dolne, and I'm here to help you make up your mind - literally and figuratively. I'm a motivational speaker, content creator, subconscious mindset coach, and the founder of The Postgrad Playbook- the only coaching platform and resource center for post-grads and 20 somethings to release mindset blocks and take action towards their chosen career , no matter how, quote unquote, unconventional that might look.
As an expert recognized by Afrotech, LinkedIn news,, and more, I help you identify what you actually want, release what's keeping you stuck, and have a game plan to take action with clarity, confidence, conviction, and ease. Here we cover all things, paving your own way and how that looks personally and professionally. Get ready to finally make up your [00:01:00] mind.
Let's get started.
Hi! Welcome back to another Make Up Your Mind Wednesday.
I hope you've been having such a great week and today we are talking about all things overcoming your fear of being seen. Yes, your subconscious fear of being seen and the fear that's been keeping you hidden and keeping you hidden from opportunity. Now, I think a lot of people don't understand quite what it means to have a fear of being seen.
It's also known as the fear of visibility or the fear of being perceived. I think that's so prevalent within our generation. Because a lot of us can be very hyper-conscious and just generally aware. And afraid of the different versions of ourselves that might live in other people's minds. So how we might show up to one person or what they might think about us or how another person might think a totally different thing for us, it is very easy for us to conform.
And sometimes when we are seen in our bright colors, there's [00:02:00] nothing to revert back to you. So that's really difficult. And it's something we're going to be talking about overcoming today. Especially since it's mid-July. We are getting closer and closer to the end of the year.
And for you to be able to achieve those new year's goals that you set. A lot of it comes down to being seen, asking for help and not being afraid to be seen trying.
I am honestly so tired of seeing so many talented creatives and whatever that creativity means for them. Like maybe film, maybe art writing, or if it's just someone trying to speak up for themselves in a meeting. I am so tired of people having the fear of being seen keeping them hidden from the opportunity that they see keeping them in a tiny shell and not breaking free from that.
So this is my way of basically telling you how to get over it. Especially if you feel like you are someone who identifies with some of the symptoms we're going to go through later, or someone who feels like you just can't break out of the shell of your [00:03:00] own comfort. Right? You can't get to the next level.
So to take it back a little bit, I did not think that I had a fear of being seen until I was really in my second year of working, I think. So to set the stage, I have always been very public. I put that in quotation marks because I in school, I did cheerleading. I did theater. I was a college tour guide, so I was very public -facing.
Honestly, I didn't feel like I had any sort of fear of being seen any visibility blocks, anything like that. I considered myself a person who was very out there and I think my friends would also agree with that and describe me as the same way. I never identified with this until I entered the workplace and started paving away of my own.
My background is working in corporate tech sales, and a lot of our buyers were on LinkedIn. So we were encouraged to post a lot on LinkedIn to be able to, you know, build our personal brands was just always a really good thing for you to do. I think [00:04:00] maybe I'll create an episode about talking about the ins and outs of building a personal brand.
If you're into that, let me know. But, it was important for us to build a personal brand to that people would be like, oh, Hey, like what's this company, what's this product that they're selling. And, maybe if they're interested in the product, then they would reach out to me. And since I was in sales, that would allow me to have a lot of leads. I was sort of hesitant when it came to posting and within our team, I was a top performer. I'd gotten a lot of awards.
So it was very encouraged for me to start posting like thought leadership content. But I really did drag my feet on this and I dragged my feet on a lot of opportunities where, sometimes emails would come through with opportunities and maybe I would take a little bit longer to respond.
And in some area of my consciousness, I noticed this happening a little bit. And I also noticed that my peers didn't seem to be having this problem.
It wasn't until my manager invited me on his personal podcast, where he talked a lot about sales and what it takes to be a top sales rep. And I was sharing my experience and [00:05:00] that went live, did I realize how much opportunity I was keeping myself hidden from, because I wasn't putting myself out there. When the episode came out and we put it on LinkedIn, we put on social media, I got a lot of positive feedback from people I've never met before.
It was featured in some really popular newsletters within our industry. And I just never received that kind of attention before within our field. Seeing that change really caused the light bulb to turn on for me in that moment. Retreating back into my shell and not sharing my accomplishments, sharing my expertise or just building a personal brand was what was exactly keeping me heading from the opportunity that I sought because of course I wanted to grow.
And from that point, when I looked back at the previous events that had happened, I saw myself dragging my feet a little bit and I saw how many missed opportunities I essentially came across.
In the last episode, we talked a little bit about diversifying our luck portfolio, and a big part of it was utilizing the attention economy. And the attention economy [00:06:00] is social media, because as humans right now, we have access to so many people globally
and if you put yourself forward and your expertise forward, your art forward, whatever you have to offer, you can be leaps and bounds ahead of where you currently- are just by showing up and just by being seen. If you want to learn more about that, I definitely recommend going ahead and giving last week's episode a listen.
Another way the fear of being seen, showed up for me was when I first started to post on TikTok, it took me hours and hours to muscle up the courage to finally post the very first video just because of the massive discoverability and the massive audiences that you can reach through TikTok.
I remember imagining some of the worst case scenarios of just having people drag me and getting canceled so publicly, because that's what I've seen happen before, but I remembered that most of the things we worry about will never happen.
I think if you find yourself falling into this boat, this is one of the best times to ask yourself what is so [00:07:00] bad about being seen.
To a lot of people, sometimes being seen and putting themselves out there, they have a sense of imposter syndrome because they might feel like, oh no. If I seen and I put myself out there, people might finally figure me out. They might figure out I'm a fraud. They might figure out that I'm not who I say I am. They might not think I'm qualified. They might not think I deserve to be here.
It's a lot of, like I mentioned earlier, what we think other people think about us, which is just a projection of what we think about ourselves.
If you find this resonating, you don't have to worry. The fear of being seen is so common. I read a stat that said about 75% of the population has a fear of public speaking and that's more than spiders and heights.
It's public speaking. But this fear does not align with your career goals. This fear is not compatible with your goals. And yes, we can feel the fear and do it anyway. We can feel the fear of being seen and move forward anyway, [00:08:00] but there are ways to ease into it so that you can move forward.
I find that people fall into one of two boats. One, they can feel the fear and do it anyways, and they can trudge forward and move forward and finally get over it. Or they are someone who is absolutely crippled by the fear.
When you start to try to put yourself out there, or you start to try to speak up in a meeting, or you try to make yourself visible in a way that's scary. Your heart starts racing. You might feel your throat clamming up.
You start sweating. You start to have all these physical reactions. Some of the other symptoms around this might look like sudden procrastination, like, oh, all of a sudden, you can't do that one thing, because you have to go walk your cat. You got to go walk your cat or like, you know, something so silly like that. You do things that are unproductively productive. You might have to all of a sudden clean your whole kitchen, or you have to call your mom about [00:09:00] that one thing that happened.
So things that are not urgent or are totally unrealistic, you come to the conclusion that you have to complete at that very moment.
Another symptom might look like extreme fatigue when it comes time to get up and do that task, you were so sleepy and you have to go take a nap and you just take 20 minutes, but then it ends up being a couple hours and you miss your window of opportunity. I remember seeing a lot of those memes on TikTok that it's like, oh, when you set the timer to start the, start your chores at four, but it's 4 0 2.
So now you have to wait till five, right? It's unreasonable logic, but I've been there. I'm not going to doubt it. It's quote unquote, unreasonable logic, but it is true, right? It's like, oh, now I miss my window of opportunity and this is a task I didn't want to do anyway, on a conscious or subconscious level, so I'm going to wait until the next time period that's most appropriate comes around so that I can start the task.
The third is forgetfulness. Maybe you set [00:10:00] the intention all day, but then all of a sudden, you just forget and before you know it, it's 9:00 PM at night and you have to go to sleep or you have to get ready for work the next day.
This can also be like forgetting to set an alarm.
So if you have to take steps to move forward to be seen you just forget to set the alarm or you forget to do the tasks that would set the foundation for you to be seen. For example, if you needed to get a new camera, you might conveniently forget to do the research about the camera.
Or you might do something to self sabotage your work day before heading into a meeting where you intend to speak up.
So little things happen along the way that don't set you up for success and shake the foundation of your goal to be seen that you have consciously.
There are a lot of symptoms that this might look like, but like I talked about in another episode, Robin Sharma said it best "potential unexpressed turns to pain." In the end, we are the ones that end up crippled by this, where you are beating our heads against the wall saying, why can't I move forward?
Why [00:11:00] is this fear so crippling to me or why it's so hard to push forward with this task when I just cannot muster up the energy.
And we talked a lot about self-sabotage about two episodes ago. That's another one you should add to your rotation after this one, if you haven't given it a listen already.
But once again, the answers lie in our subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind runs about 90 to 95% of your programming. It is your deepest thoughts. Your beliefs. Your creativity.
Your imagination, your intuition. It is who you are at your core. So what happens is from the ages of zero to seven or somewhere along the way up until now, you have. Internalized or learned that is not safe for you to be seen. Maybe when you're really young, you had a performance and someone made fun of you and it triggered a response that was so negative that, that situation and that emotional response is embedded in all the feelings that you feel when you think about being [00:12:00] seen.
So now when you think about showing up online or speaking up in a meeting or sharing something about yourself, or just being your most authentic self. You think about that time you're ridiculed and that's what your subconscious mind has programmed you to believe will happen every time you show up as yourself.
There are many rules of the subconscious mind, but the number one goal of it is to keep you safe. And to the subconscious mind safe means familiar and familiar in the sense that it has this past history, that it has accumulated over however many years old that you are, that is like a library of predictable events.
Your subconscious will never want you to venture out into some new unknown territory. I.E. Finding success on social media or finding success being seen because it's unfamiliar and it doesn't want you to have unfamiliar experiences because in that sense, it's not safe.
This is extremely, extremely common for very successful and ambitious people, because if you're successful and ambitious now, most likely [00:13:00] you've had that kind of success in the past.
And a lot of times when you are successful,, it is met with ostracization, jealousy, snide comments, maybe you lose friends or overall some negative experiences come with it. So if you are trying to be a filmmaker, for example, and you want to create these films and you want to share it with the world, but maybe you have some limiting beliefs around your authentic ideas and being seen for those authentic ideas, it's going to be very hard and you're going to have that fear of being seen. And you might see those symptoms of self-sabotage showing up.
No matter what you're trying to pursue, it is so important to go through an exercise on root cause identification that will get you to the root of the problem.
If you haven't done this already, I'm offering a free 14 question root cause identification, journaling prompts that I will send to you free. And all you have to do is review this podcast and send me a screenshot @thepostgradsplaybook on Instagram.
So just review it on [00:14:00] apple podcast and I'll send it to you your way and it'll help you start to release a subconscious block. I find that the more journaling that you do around these areas and the morning you start to uncover what the root cause is it generally boils down into four different ones.
The first being a little bit of that imposter syndrome that we talked about, right? You might feel fundamentally flawed. Like there is something at the core of you that is fundamentally flawed, that other people just can't see yet.
And if you show up and are seen and you put your most authentic and creative works out there, that is a reflection of you, it's going to come out, you're going to get caught. Which obviously we know is not true.
The second comes with changes in your immediate environment, maybe your friends and your families. They may act differently towards you. I come from an immigrant background. I'm a child of Haitian immigrants and so I know that being a doctor, lawyer, and engineer, in a lot of immigrant communities is what's normalized.
So when I thought about pivoting into [00:15:00] something new, that was away from my quote unquote sexy tech career, I was very nervous.
I know that's a little bit different, but it's difficult to deviate from societal expectations. And what's expected of you and what's been encouraged to pave your own way when there's no real guarantee that it will happen, even though we have faith it'll happen,there's no guarantee.
For some people, a third one is that the more success that you have, the more of a burden you'll be.
A lot of times, people who are successful are propped onto a pedestal and they receive a lot of accolades. So that might cause some rifts around them, or it might make other people see them as a burden.
And lastly, one core limiting belief might be, you were just afraid of out shining and steering away from the pack.
We want community around us. We want people to love and accept us. And sometimes out shining and standing out in our authentic colors can threaten that structure.
No matter which of these limiting beliefs that you feel like you might resonate with the most, I want you to know two [00:16:00] things. The first is that you're probably a victim to the spotlight effect which is a psychological phenomenon where you feel like everybody is looking at you and thinking about you all the time. I promise you are a special, but you are not that special. Where everyone is thinking about you and looking at you all the time. And I say that very kindly. Think about how much you think about other people? And think about how much you think about yourself. I guarantee you, you were thinking about yourself 95% of the time because you have your own life to live. You have your own things to do, and you have your own responsibilities and other people are the same way.
People do not think about you nearly as much as you probably think that they think about you. It's not even close. And if they are thinking about you and maybe if they are thinking about you negatively or in a way where you feel like you are being judged, then that's not someone you would want a part of your community or your support system anyway and they can go.
A lot of times when we [00:17:00] are elevating and where you're doing better for ourselves it's very common to see that the circle around us changes. Because sometimes people don't elevate with us and that's okay. That is totally fine. And maybe you've already seen evidence of that in your life. The second thing I did want to tell you is thankfully our brains are malleable and you can completely rewire it for the professional success that you're looking for.
And to overcome this fear of being seen your brain works with your nervous system to produce these effects in your body. Like I mentioned earlier, the heart racing, the sweating, the weight in your chest, the throat clamming up and so on. It works with your body to keep you physically from moving forward. So that's why it's so important for you to get to the root cause of a fear of being seen of being perceived of being visible and so on, so that your body is not working against you.
You want your goals and your nervous system to be as compatible as possible.
I'm not going to leave you hanging on how to do that. There are a couple of somatic [00:18:00] exercises that I absolutely swear by to be able to overcome this, the first being EFT tapping. I talk about it all the time and there are a lot of free videos on YouTube on how to do it, to overcome the fear of being seen. But really it is, tapping on certain meridian points around your body to be able to decrease the tension and the sensations that you feel when you think about doing this task and maybe the fear that might come up with it.
It's a mix of American psychology and Chinese acupressure that has come up a lot over the last several years and I promise you. Just keep doing it. And you will thank me that you, you will thank me that you started. It is one of the best things that I've ever discovered.
Secondly, is visualizations, because your subconscious cannot tell the difference between real and imagined experiences.
So if you imagine yourself being seen and play out scenarios in your mind of it being safe and it being happy, and it being everything that you've ever wanted, you will subconsciously start to work towards that end [00:19:00] result, and it will feel familiar because you've already seen it. Lastly is affirmations in the mirror or when you're falling asleep. Affirmations to create the, end result that you're looking for or affirmations that are affirming, that it is safe and it is okay to be seen for who you are and stand in the spotlight. Um, and show your work and be creative and honor yourself.
I just binged Owning Manhattan. I think that's what it's called.
It's a new show on Netflix. I love reality TV and that's a new real estate reality TV show that came out. And one of the first, I think the opening line that Serhant the guy who runs the whole firm. He was talking about when he was driving by a cemetery with his grandfather who had passed away, or his father who had passed away, one of them. And he was saying, look over there and what do you see? And he was like, oh, I see like a bunch of dead people. But his grandfather is like, yeah, you see a bunch of dead people, but will you also see is a lot [00:20:00] of failed potential.
You see a lot of mathematicians, you see a lot of creatives. You see a lot of people who didn't have their dreams come to light and they worked in a profession that was completely misaligned. I'm paraphrasing it, but that was the general gist of what he said. If you watch the show, you'll get what I'm saying, but don't let this be your season of wasted potential.
Don't let your actions direct you towards wasted potential because of this fear of being seen. You can do it. And there are people who are half as qualified as you out there and doing it. So that's really all I had to say today.
Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you're having an amazing Wednesday and thank you so much for joining me. If you're on YouTube, make sure that you subscribe. If you're on apple podcasts or Spotify, go ahead and give me a follow and write a review on apple podcasts.
So that way this podcast can reach the people who need it most. So thank you so much once again, and I hope you have a great day and I'm rooting for you as always bye.
