One of my biggest challenges as an entrepreneur has been being willing to put myself out there and build a big audience/grow a large community.

I’ve had a lot of fears around large groups of people and when I dig really deeply, the fear is that I won’t be able to control the crowd. That if it gets too big people will turn on me, trample me, stone me to death, or burn me at the stake.

Of course that isn’t going to happen in Australia in 2019. There are definitely places in the world where those things are taking place, but my home town isn’t one of them.

Nevertheless the fears are very real. I call them my witchy fears.

Four hundred years of witch hunts is a consciousness that’s embedded deep in my cells. That was the intention of the witch hunts. To eradicate the feminine. To quash emotion and intuition. To disconnect us from the power of the earth. To silence powerful women.

If you’re a woman of colour, other inherited fears will sit deeply in your cells. Fears of being chained and shipped across oceans, of mass murders, of genocide, of lynching, of being beaten and/or raped for speaking up or being seen.

And there’s a collective consciousness that all women carry; of non-consensual sex, of sex by attrition, of date rape and gang rape, of physical assault, and sexual harassment.

To be truly comfortable with being seen and heard in the world, we have to find a way to clear those fears.

It is extremely difficult to keep putting yourself out there in your career if these fears occupy a part of your conscious, subconscious, or unconscious mind.

So that’s the visibility prompt today; to uncover your witchy fears, whatever they show up like for you.

The easiest way to uncover them is to link the fears back to your challenges today around big groups of people. Whether the fear relates to growing your audience, building a community, or performing in front of large crowds. Start by write down on a piece of paper – stream of consciousness style – if I grow my community/perform in front of thousands of people/build my audience then… and just see what comes up as your pen hits the page.

Then use whatever technique works best for you to clear those fears. If you’re not sure where to begin or would like some support, I teach a whole raft of techniques in Feminine Leadership which is open for registration now.

Clearing out collective fears is just as important as clearing out individual fears. The more women we can get clearing these collective fears, the more all women benefit. This is how we build our businesses and our creative careers, and it’s also how we smash the patriarchy.