My man I feel this deeply and was actually in the same exact position interestingly enough. I’ve been making some really positive strides the last 4 weeks and would love to share some background and what’s been working in case any of it resonates.
Ive been a startup founder/exec the last 14 years and i resigned april 2024. I was insanely burned out and needed a massive reset. I gave myself a year to not put pressure on myself and just explore my creativity and passions and reset my nervous system. I came up with tons of interesting ideas and concepts but the fear of failure or committing to a single idea weighed on me. I only recently learned about ROCD and got diagnosed with it, but the more I learn about it, the more i am seeing it show up not just in my relationship with my fiance, but also in my work. Its wild.
It’s now been 14 months and while i’ve generated income from some small projects it’s not enough to sustain and i’ve been really getting in my head thinking “holy shit, why is it hard for me to make money right now?!” And it’s been putting me in a total downward spiral of self-doubt, fear, comparison, perfectionism, and hesitation. Because of this i keep flip flopping between ideas and it’s been an emotional and energetic rollercoaster. The more I approach my work from this frequency the louder it gets.
Here’s what I’ve started doing to turn things around:
1. I got real with my finances and mapped my monthly burn rate and my actual run way (e.g., how many months REALLY do i have before i’m sweating it??). In doing this, I saw i actually am in a better financial position that my mind is telling me, which was a huge source of my fear and survival mode I was in which ultimately led me to putting massiveeee pressure on myself that wasn’t needed or helpful. It’s allowing me to get real and breath through any moments of panic so i can regulate my nervous system, quiet my mind, and get to a place of grounded clarity
2. I got real with what i actually wanted to do that lit me the fuck up. I journaled for 30 minutes on the prompt “if i was fearless and knew i wouldn’t fail, what would i do? What would i create? Who would i be?” This became a solid anchor for me in defining my future self and state i was after
3. This was critical: i set aside 90 minutes of deep, uninterrupted, focused work each morning strictly dedicated to building my vision for my business. I of course do more than 90 minutes a day of work, but this morning deep work ritual is now my training ground for making quantum leaps each week because I mapped out my higher order objective, set weekly targets, and then identify my top priority for the day, and then just do it, no excuses, just devotion and courage
4. I started getting back to my fundamental daily habits that I know create rhythm and structure and momentum in my life and started tracking them
5. I do daily reviews of my vision and how I showed up for the day. This is big, especially with OCD, it’s really helpful to have a feedback loop of daily contemplation and reflection
I have not been perfect by any means and often I take a few steps back. The important thing is to have a process to come back to. This has been working for me and I hope you can get something out of this as well. Because the fear of failure cannot rule us if we dare to be creators of our lives. We must dare to liberate ourselves so we can bring peace and prosperity to our lives.
Final thought on the rumination on the job loss…find a way to be grateful for it and see that this next chapter is inviting you, calling you, to a more fulfilling place in your life. It was simply the inciting moment to shift your world. Something that helped me after I resigned as a partner in my last company where I held onto massive resentment and anger towards my other partners is I wrote a super raw and fucking real letter to each of them. I read them out loud in the mirror and felt into them deeply. I allowed myself to just be in the pain and anger without judging it our shaming it or trying to fix it. Then, I burned them and tossed the Ashe’s in the toilet.
“Let that shit go”
Curious if any of this lands for you, and sorry for the behemoth of a comment, just really resonated with me as you can see.
