Grace Beverley

I did a bonus episode on this over a year ago now and it got such a huge response and since then I've come to genuinely think that the main thing that holds most people back is not a lack of talent, it's not a lack of ideas, it's not even a lack of discipline.

it is a fear of what other people think and what makes that even sadder I think is that some of the people with the most to give are often the ones holding back the most because they are hyper aware of how they're perceived and I really don't think we ourselves are to blame because we're living in a time where everything feels very public it is very public it feels permanent

It feels open to commentary and that makes risk feel heavier than it ever has before.

So today I really want to unpack why that is.

I want to talk through three steps that have really helped me to actually get over this fear in a very practical way.

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So firstly, I want to start by talking about the idea that we're more scared to try than ever.

And I really don't think that's dramatic.

There's actually research showing that Gen Z and younger millennials report higher levels of social anxiety and fear of negative evaluation than previous generations.

And a lot of psychologists actually link that to the rise of social media, which I think we can probably all agree with.

And with that coming the constant visibility, the feeling of being observed and perceived the whole time.

And with this, studies on something called the spotlight effect shows that we dramatically overestimate how much other people notice and remember our mistakes, which is totally fair enough.

Like, in your world, you are the main character.

In my world, I am the main character.

It is very easy to think that when you do something wrong, people are going to be thinking about it just as much as you do, particularly when that feels magnified by so many different social platforms.

And what I found was really interesting is in a classic experiment by psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky,

participants were asked to wear an embarrassing t-shirt into a room of strangers and then estimate how many people noticed it.

On average, they believed around half the room had registered it.

In reality, it was closer to a quarter.