I Was Afraid To Launch

✦ ✦ ✦

I told a couple of close friends about the vision. They joined immediately as paid members. Then, silence. No new interest. In my mind, that silence became proof that no one else wanted what I was building, and I quietly stopped promoting it, telling myself I was still refining the plan when really I was avoiding the exposure of putting it fully in front of people.

I want to be honest about how convincing that story felt while I was telling it to myself. Refining the plan sounded responsible, even wise. It took me longer than I want to admit to recognize it as a costume the fear was wearing, one that let me feel productive while actually protecting myself from the vulnerability of a real launch.

I had been in ministry over thirty years, and I was still shocked at how much I had left to learn about leading something I was fully in charge of, rather than supporting someone else's vision. Being second in command, I already knew how to do well. Building and owning the whole structure was a different kind of exposed, the kind where there was no one else's name to share the risk with if it did not land the way I hoped.

There was a particular evening I remember clearly, sitting with the unpublished post open on my screen again, feeling a familiar wave of resistance rise, and asking myself, plainly, what I was actually afraid people would think. The answer, when I let myself hear it fully, was almost embarrassingly specific. I was afraid someone I respected would see it and quietly decide I had overstepped, had claimed an authority I had not earned, had confused ambition for calling. That fear had a face. It had names attached to it, people whose opinions I had given more authority over my obedience than I meant to.

God began impressing three words on me during that season: systems, strategies, sustainability. I prayed for direction on what I needed to learn, and I felt led to simply host the interest meetings I had already planned and never launched, laying the vision out plainly, who it was for, what transformation it offered.

The fear of what others would think or say was loud. The fear of disobeying what I already knew I was supposed to do was louder.

I had to get out of my own head, stop manufacturing new reasons to delay, and just do the thing I had already fully prepared to do. When I finally did publish that post, weeks later than I had originally planned, nothing catastrophic happened. No one I feared misunderstanding actually said a word. The silence I had built into such a significant verdict about my calling turned out to have been mostly manufactured by my own imagination, filling space that reality had never actually occupied.

Here is what I want to say to the leader sitting on a finished plan she has not yet launched, waiting for the fear of being misunderstood to fully subside before she moves. It will not fully subside. It rarely does. The launch is not waiting on your fear to disappear. It is waiting on your willingness to move while the fear is still talking, loudly, convincingly, using the voices of people who may never even notice you moved.

I think about the specific gap between what I feared and what actually happened, because that gap has become one of the more reliable teachers in my life since. I had rehearsed entire conversations defending myself against confusion that never materialized. The energy I spent bracing for misunderstanding could have gone directly into building the thing itself, months earlier, if I had trusted that the bracing was mostly unnecessary before I ever tested it against reality.

I do not think that means fear is always wrong about the risk. Sometimes the misunderstanding does come. Sometimes people do react exactly the way you feared. What I have learned is that the fear rarely arrives with an accurate sense of scale. It tells you the room will be crowded with judgment, and usually, when you finally look, the room is smaller and far more indifferent than the fear promised, already occupied with its own concerns, only glancing briefly at yours before moving on.

The interest meetings I finally hosted did not fill a stadium. They filled a modest, honest room of people who were genuinely curious, some of whom joined, some of whom did not, none of whom reacted with the confusion or judgment I had spent weeks bracing against. I remember standing in front of that small group, laying out the vision plainly, and feeling almost disoriented by how anticlimactic the actual exposure turned out to be compared to the version I had rehearsed in my head for months.

I think about that gap often now, the distance between the rehearsed catastrophe and the mild, ordinary reality, whenever I feel the old resistance rising around a new, more visible step. It does not make the fear disappear in advance. It simply gives me a track record to set against it, proof gathered the hard way that the fear's predictions and reality's actual response rarely match as closely as the fear insists they will.

-- Dr. Rhonda

The Next Step: If you have a finished plan you have not yet launched because you are waiting for the fear of being misunderstood to pass, take The Close the Leadership Gap Diagnostic™. It is built to help you see exactly what is actually holding the launch back, so you can finally move past it.