This week I want to talk about what we do with the fear of failure.

It’s so so important that we address this as an elephant in the room for anyone who is contemplating doing something new or putting themselves out there in any way with their ideas or work. At some stage or another in our lives, our businesses or in our attempts at creating, we’ve all felt the sting of failure or disappointment.

-       Something hasn’t quite taken off.

-       The thing you poured your soul into was met with crickets

-       The product you really believed in didn’t sell as well as you hoped.

-       The idea you have had for a lifetime suddenly seems to be happening for other people all around you.

-       We’ve all lost steam. We’ve all lost our nerve. We’ve all shut down and stopped.

This is the stuff of being human and we need to talk about it and normalise it just as much as we do the strategies and the reflective tasks we undertake when things are going well. Especially for women, failure feels personal. It feels overwhelming and daunting. It shuts us down, closes us up and stops us from moving forward because failure feels SO vulnerable and exposing. Often it feels like visceral rejection when things haven’t gone the way we hoped.

But - if we continue to try to hide from the things that aren’t going well, and bypass the hard feelings about the ways in which we feel things haven’t worked out we are going to miss out on a huge component of growth, of resilience building and of the courage honing muscles that it takes to life fully as a whole hearted person. To fail and just hide is to skip the most significant work that we can do as humans. To fail and learn is how we grow and evolve and develop empathy for ourselves and others.

Building a business is tricky and even though I absolutely LOVE my job, I would hate for anyone to look in at Assembly and think that it magically and easily appeared. In that spirit, I thought that this week I would share three things that I’ve learned about building a business that I feel don’t get talked about enough in entrepreneurship.

It's true that the most amount of effort that I’ve had to put in in building my business is the effort of managing my own fears, insecurities and doubts. It’s really difficult to be brave and comfortable at the same time. But I know that taking action, practicing using my voice and getting some support in my business has made all the difference.

The Assembly Membership Community is now open for new members to join any time. You can find all the details here: https://www.melwiggins.com/assembly-membership

Today I thought it might be fun to get practical and talk through where to start when you have an idea or are coming up with a new project or offering in your work or creative life.

It can feel so exciting when an idea or a new thing lands in your mind right? Tingly, interesting, fun, scary, thrilling. All of those feelings have come up for me when I’ve contemplated something a bit new.

And if you’re also like me, the next breath can offer a whole bunch of overwhelm. Where do I start? Which part of the process of bringing this to life or experimenting is the best course to start down?

So what I want to do is offer two simple strands for starting. Two strands that will set you in the right direction when it comes to slowly breathing life into your next idea or thing.

In my work, coaching women, it is a common theme that one of the hardest parts of being brave and showing up as your truest self with your work and ideas is the risk of not being liked.

I believe that intuition is a superpower that we all possess – a gift within us that is our most sacred, trustworthy, brilliant internal guidance system. Like a compass that we can use to understand ourselves more deeply. And yet most of us dismiss it, or forget about it or override it because we live in such a fast-paced, quick fix society where we want other people to tell us the answers to all of our problems and how we should live.

In this episode I'm giving you five ways that you can cut through the the noise and cultivate your own wise sense of intuition.

I wonder what comes up for you when you think about an ambitious woman? Is there an image or a set of feelings that you might attach to that word: Ambition?

I KNOW so many women find it really hard to admit that they are ambitious. The fear of coming across as ambitious feels really scary for us because our culture hasn’t allowed women to celebrate their desire for more.

As if wanting more for this one life that we’ve got is greedy, needy or will make us unlikeable in some way.

This episodes dives into why it's hard for us as women to own our ambition and why it's important that we begin to turn the tide on the negative, damaging tropes around women's ambitions that keep us small, embarrassed and resentful.

The concept of 'self-care' is having a bit of a moment lately, right? That sounds good, but what if it isn't enough? What if what is pitched to us as self-care actually feels like another thing to add to an already full to-do list.

It sounds like we need a revamp of what it really means to care for ourselves and in this episode I'm going to walk you through the two core components that I believe leads us to a richer, more sustainable way of self-care.

I'm not sure what it is that brought you to this podcast today, but I imagine that for whatever reason, you need some bravery for something. Maybe you've been thinking about a challenge or you've got an idea that you are toying with or thing that you really want to say or do and all of the feelings are showing up for you.  Maybe you've maybe you've dipped your toe in the water of something new and fear has got you totally frozen or unable to move past the point of that toe-dip. And you're actually really ready to run back to safer shores.  If that's you and you feel like there are so many swirling racing thoughts running around your head about what could go wrong, about your own capabilities or how you might fail or make a fool out of yourself? This episode is for you.

In today's episode, the first ever episode of Courage Is Calling, I thought it would be good to introduce you to what I call The Courage Concept. This is a culmination of my work, research and experience over the last number of years and is the framework that I have developed to help women understand the components of building courage. Because it's really simple and really hard. 

Hello, and welcome to the Courage Is Calling podcast. My name is Mel Wiggins and this podcast is the go-to space for brilliant women who need a courage pep talk from time to time. Hands up if that's you! 

Building courage in our lives and our work is hard. It's hard. And it's hard because courage is built by taking action and trying things out and taking action and trying things out means often taking some risks or venturing into something without any real assurance of the outcome. And doing that is vulnerable. It's really hard. And so I want to be able to show up here in this podcast space and make that vulnerable, courage building journey, a little less lonely for us all. 

I want you to know that you can come here and find a little bit of insight, a little bit of solidarity, or a little bit of support, and just take it with you into the world and do your thing.

Consider this your personal pep talk station. 

I hope you'll join me every other week as we build some bravery together because my friends, you have some brilliant stuff to do in the world. And, courage is calling.