Good morning from New York City. What’s on my mind this morning is facing your fears and new beginnings. It’s pretty obvious that this is what’s on my mind because I’m facing my own fears and embarking on this new adventure to leave New York for five months in less than two weeks at this point.

Truth be told, there have been many moments of heavy energy, not having the answers to the questions people are asking me, and this fear I have of traveling alone keeps butting its head. It’s really interesting because my friends always say what do you mean you’re afraid of traveling alone? You travel alone all the time. And it’s true. I go to Europe regularly all alone. I’ve been doing it for 20 years. Yet when I go to Spain or Italy for example, I have a whole history there and many dear friends.  I’m not quite sure where this fear comes from, but it’s a real thing and I’ve been carrying it for so many years so right now I’m looking to rewire my thinking around that.

I’m sure you’ve heard the sequence of your thoughts determine your feelings, your feelings determine your actions, and your actions determine your results. We all know that. So in order to look at this and face my fears and rewire my thinking, I’ve done two things. First, I did a goal setting workshop with my friend, Susie DeVille. She’s the owner of the Innovation and Creativity Institute, and she’s been looking at current neuroscience and how it relates to goal setting in a way that feels more exciting and appealing versus the goal setting that is white knuckling your way to whatever it is you’re trying to achieve. The other thing I did is something called a rapid rewiring method session with my friend Jackie Dumaine. That involved a series of questions, and as we were doing it I realized that exactly this time 18 years ago I moved to New York. During the session,  I had this very vivid memory of the day I arrived. It was a rainy Saturday night. It was dark and I was in a yellow cab and I remember looking up at the lights of New York feeling so excited about this new life I was creating for myself and feeling so proud of myself that I had faced my fear and come to New York all alone to embark on a new life, a new job, a new apartment, in a place I had only ever visited as a tourist.

So what happened is I let that feeling and that memory flood every cell of my body and it shifted my thoughts. I started thinking about this adventure that I’m embarking on in a way that flooded out the negative, heavy energy around all these questions people are asking me. Where am I going? What am I doing? And the fact of the matter is I don’t have the answer. I don’t know, and that is how I’m challenging myself. It’s part of my adventure. Yet the negative thoughts were creeping in and I’ve been feeling anxious over the last couple of days. I remembered how important it is to surround yourself with like-minded people, as I did in the goal setting session, and how important and powerful it can be to redirect your thoughts. Because it totally impacts your feeling state and your feeling state determine your actions. So it’s thought, feeling, action, result and it’s very powerful to take that bull by the horns.

I want to end with that question that my father used to ask me from a very young age. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Often when you take the time to unpack that question, it can really open the floodgates. So I’ll leave you with that thought today. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Until next time, from my heart to yours.