It's interesting to kind of see your avoidance tendencies, you know, like, what do you, like what do you sort of go to avoidance strategies?

You know, do you just fully say no to something?

Do you only do part of something, the part that's more

palatable to you, but don't do the other part. Do you substitute the thing that

you're afraid of for something that's less fearful but probably less effective.

Like for example a small business owner I interviewed, he told me that he was very uncomfortable

networking and sort of schmoozing and also selling, frankly.

And he owned a small travel agency.

And the problem was is that for him to get sort of a foothold

in his business, he needed to build relationships

with people in his community, because ultimately they're going with him because they trust him and they know him

But he was really uncomfortable in these situations so he would often default to

Posting on Facebook or email blasts, which by the way isn't bad, but it's not a

substitute for what he needed to do and what he was really actually afraid to do.

Sometimes we'll pass the buck, we'll have someone else do something that we probably

should be the person doing. You know, and then sometimes we'll just rationalize and say, you know, this really isn't that important that I, you know, that I learn to speak up in meetings.

It's not that important that I, you know, I don't know, start doing more public speaking or be assertive to a colleague who is really undermining me.

You know, they'll change their behavior or whatever it is.

We come up with a rationalization when in fact it probably would be important, you know, useful, helpful, you know, it would be important

for me but we rationalize it away.

So the bottom line here is that there's a variety of ways that we

avoid and sometimes it's important I think to look ourselves in the mirror and kind of

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