Hello, Fears Chapter 1 Excerpt

Hello, Fears, Chapter 1 Excerpt I’m backstage, standing next to Lisa, an event manager who is wearing a black headset and giving instructions to the control room.

“Dave, put Michelle’s presentation on—and make sure the volume is up,” she says quietly while looking straight at me. I nod and smile back to let her know I’m ready to go out and CRUSH IT! On the inside, however, I’m sweating, and my heart is racing faster than a cheetah going after a bunny. What a terrible image I just put into your head. Sorry, bunny.

The emcee of the event starts reading my introduction from the stage. “If you’ve ever wondered what your life would be like if you weren’t afraid”—as she says that, I also wonder what the answer to that question is. I’m VERY nervous to say the least—“you’re about to find out! Welcome Michelle Poler!”

I’m still backstage, praying for my clicker to work but hearing the loud cheers from the crowd reminds me, one more time, that they are not the enemy. There is *nothing* they want more than for me to be EXTRA awesome, so they can go back home and share all about this wonderful speaker who made their trip worth it.

Cue Dave in the control room cranking up the volume—party level—because HERE. I. GO! I click to my own walk up music—“Dura” by Daddy Yankee (no shame here)—and I start dancing as if I were standing next to Daddy Yankee himself, on stage, at the MTV Video Music Awards. Except that it’s just me, in front of eight thousand women whose eyes just popped out real big because they were not expecting that kind of dancing at 8:00 a.m. on a Tuesday.

I feel so good now. Reggaeton is the only thing that calms my nerves. I’m ready to get vulnerable, share my story of how I was able to overcome my fears and inspire these women to do the same. Because seeing the immediate impact my words have on them is what makes my trips worth it!

But wait! It wasn’t always like this! Let’s rewind four years back in time: There I am, taking a shower after a long day at the office, listening to my own playlist “Cool Now” on Spotify, as I always do. The first song that started playing was “I Lived” by OneRepublic. Have you ever heard it? As I was paying close attention to the lyrics, I started crying, well…sobbing. Whatever they were describing in the song, was BEYOND any experiences I’d had. I realized I had NOT lived. Well, technically, I’d been alive for twentyfive years, but living living…nah. That was the epiphany I needed to say, “Hello, Fears.”

It all started when I moved to New York in 2014 to pursue a master’s degree in branding at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Debbie Millman, branding guru and the founder of the program, asked us a *simple* question during the first day of class: “Where would you like to be ten years from today?”* Have you thought about that? A *simple* question—yeah, right. This had to be one of the most daunting questions anyone had ever asked me before in my life.

If you’ve asked yourself this, you know that when trying to answer you want to dream big…but not too big! You want to sound ambitious but humble. You start dreaming of a 150foot yacht and somewhere down the line you settle for a freaking kayak! You don’t want to disappoint future you with BIG plans that went nowhere and then feel like a big FAILURE, right?

So, I started to write down semi-ambitious things that I thought could make me happy ten years from that day: In ten years, after working for some of the best companies in New York, I will finally become an entrepreneur! I’ll be working with Adam, my husband, on building our business together (whatever it is), we will be traveling a lot together for work, and we’ll love it, I will be invited to speak at companies and events about my accomplishments, and we will buy our first apartment in Manhattan!

Right after writing my plan, Debbie asked us to identify one crucial obstacle that could get in the way of our plans. In a matter of seconds, I was transported back to that moment of me weeping in the shower weeks before this assignment was posted. I realized I had not lived because of one thing: FEAR. Fear was the one obstacle that could totally prevent me from achieving my ten-year plan.

How could I apply to the best companies in NYC if I was so afraid of rejection? How could I then become an entrepreneur if I couldn’t deal with uncertainty? How could I ever build a thriving business if I was terrified of networking and self-promotion? How would I ever be able to speak at conferences about my “accomplishments” if I was terribly scared of public speaking? And why would we buy an apartment in NYC if I’d been struggling to feel comfortable in this city for the last nine months? I wanted ALL of those things, but I was dreadfully afraid of them.

I realized that I was hungry for success, but driven by fear.

The class assignment that came next is what flipped my life upside down.