How To Prevent Fear From Sabotaging Your Dreams

Guest Post by Mel Johnson, founder of The Stork and I.  Photo credit NC Hope Photography. 

I’m forty in a few months and have been single for most of the last ten years. Since I was in my late 20’s I had a strong desire to become a mother. Following the breakdown of a long term relationship when I was twenty-nine, I threw myself into dating.  However, despite my best efforts, throughout all of my 30’s I’ve been unsuccessful at finding a suitable partner to settle down with.

Being single does not make becoming a mother easy. It isn’t impossible though. When I started to worry that realising my dream of becoming a mum might be at risk, due to my age and the associated decline in my fertility, I started to look at alternative options.

I gave significant thought to becoming a solo mum. Using a sperm donor and IVF my dream of motherhood could be possible, but something was holding me back. The thing that was preventing me from moving forward was fear.

The Fear Inventory

Fear can stand in the way of us achieving our goals. It can take hold of all our thoughts and block us from living the life we dream of. One of the techniques I used to help me overcome my fears allowing me to follow the path of solo motherhood was to carry out a Fear Inventory. This is the process of moving the subconscious thoughts and fears that we have roaming around in our heads, into our conscious minds by writing them all down.

I had a heavy burden of unconscious fears about becoming a solo mum and this was holding me back from making a decision about whether to embark on this journey. Seeing them written down helped me to understand them more clearly and to create the space to address them and make them seem less significant and overwhelming.

How to carry out a Fear Inventory:

• Allocate a period of time in a quiet space with a pen and paper
• Take time to reflect on everything that has been causing you anxiety. Think about people, situations, dilemmas, issues, places and experiences that are sitting heavy on your mind
• Write everything that comes to your mind down.  Don’t worry if it goes on for pages and pages, especially if it is the first time you have done it.  Get everything out of your head and onto the paper
• Reflect a bit more and keep going, write down everything you can think of
• It can help to split your fears into 2 categories:
  • Deep rooted long term fear
  • Current anxieties about things coming up in the short term

The outcome of my Fear Inventory was split into the following areas:

• Fear of what other people would think and their judgement of me
• Fear about whether I would be able to manage with no partner for support
• Fear about what my future child would think about the situation and whether it was fair on them to bring them into the world with only one parent

I took each one of these themes in turn and wrote as much as I possibly could about the fear I identified.  This helped to fully understand it and to decide how to manage it.

Benefits of creating a Fear Inventory:

1) Lessens the power of the fears

By detailing all the fears that have been occupying your mind into a document, it creates the process of removing them from your head. You have them captured on a hard copy, so that you don’t need to store them in your mind and think about them all the time anymore. This lessons the power they have over you and makes them seem less significant and crippling.

2) You see your fears more objectively

When you can see your fears clearly laid out in front of you in all their glory, it allows you the opportunity to review them in an entirely objective way. Often they will seem more manageable that they do when they are running around your mind.

3) Easier to address your fears and take action on them

Once you have written them down and you can clearly see what you’re afraid of, you’re in a better position to be able to address them. You can go through each one in turn and decide how to deal with it. You can decide to take action to lessen it, or just be more comfortable that it is there, but it doesn’t need to be an issue for you.

Once I had completed this exercise I was better able to make a decision to proceed down my chosen path. My mind felt much less cluttered and my anxieties had eased. The result of the exercise for me was that I found the fears much easier to manage since they came fully into my conscious mind.  I realised too that there wasn’t as much to be fearful of as I thought.  

If you have enjoyed this post, why not have a read of our 3 Step Plan To Get You Moving Forward or 8 Ways To Help You Ditch Mum Guilt.

Bio:

Following her own experience of becoming a solo mum, Mel Johnson created The Stork and I, an online community, to support single women in their 30’s and 40’s who want to realise their dreams of becoming a mother. Follow her journey on Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to her blog for more information.