Many of my CDL clients are currently working on their fear of being seen. And as we talk through their feelings, I’m noticing that everyone is saying the same thing. This fear didn’t come from them; someone told them to be afraid of being seen. 

Now, it’s not always in those words. But if you were being told that calladita te ves mas bonita as a kid, you’re going to remember that during a brainstorming meeting at work and keep your ideas to yourself. And the blame for that is not necessarily on our parents – the blame is on the culture that perpetuates misogyny in our everyday lives. It’s time to let go of what doesn’t work for us and start taking our voices back. 

In this week’s episode, we’re talking about the fear of being seen and how it isn’t insecurity – it’s cultural conditioning. I don’t think that you’re actually insecure; I think you’re holding on to cultural values that are detrimental to the badass chingona you’re trying to become. Let’s talk about why these values don’t work for us, and how to let them go so that you can live your most amazing life! 

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Podcast production for this episode was provided by CCST, an Afro-Latina-owned boutique podcast production and copywriting studio. 

Episode Transcript:

Erika: Hello friends. Welcome back to Chingona Revolution podcast.this week we are [00:01:00] talking about the fear of being seen. If you’ve ever been. In a meeting at work, and maybe you have the desire to say something, but there’s this knot in your throat and you end up not speaking up. Or perhaps you are in a relationship and you know specifically what you want from your partner, but you can’t find the courage to tell them what you want because you’re afraid that if you do, they may limit your or diminish your needs, or they may make fun of you or they may not deliver.

This also comes up a lot specifically around showing up to build your brand and creating content. And this month my group program, courage Driven Latina, is working on a visibility challenge. So this visibility challenge is inviting them to post either online or our, on our internal community for 20 days.

And I am seeing the messages that are coming through for my clients. Messages, like, oh my gosh, [00:02:00] I was overthinking this. It took me an hour, or I had to take a deep breath and close my eyes before I hit publish. And it reminded me of when I was first building my brand and how afraid I was to be seen. So this episode is going to dive into why we fear putting ourselves out there, especially if you’re a woman, especially if you’re a woman of color.

If you are first gen, and why this is such a difficult thing for us, that doesn’t mean we’re not confident. It actually has a way deeper meaning. So, funny enough, this visibility challenge kicked off. While I was in Mexico, I’m still in Mexico right now, and you know, I think sometimes I live in my own bubble of personal development and friends who are also entrepreneurs.

And I forget that some people are not as open-minded. And being in Mexico and being in, in a city, I was visiting my dad’s side of the family, which I, I don’t see them very [00:03:00] often. I actually spent 20 years not. Around them. So there’s cousins that I’ve never met because they were born after I stopped seeing the side of the family and it wasn’t really my choice.

My parents ended up separating.

Oh my goodness. Perfect timing. I’m gonna read out a slack message that I just saw pop up on my screen. So my client who’s doing the visibility challenge says, day two, done. Does this get any easier at Coach Erika? Like, will I ever stop overthinking this and pulling the covers over my face as soon as I hit send?

And the little emoji that has eyes looking to the side? If you have ever attempted to create content, you know exactly what this client is talking about. Uh,you know, the overthinking that goes into putting yourself out there. If you’ve ever reread an email at work before you send it, that’s a great clue as well, that you’re overthinking or that, that you’re afraid of being seen here.

You’re afraid of making a mistake. And [00:04:00] I’m going, to go into what this fear really is. But let me come back to my Mexico story. That was just perfect timing that a client happened to be like, oh my gosh, does this get any easier? So as I am visiting this, my dad’s side of the family, I am reminded that some people really just are not as open-minded in our culture.

And it makes so much sense that Latinas find it difficult to speak up. And it’s not that we aren’t educated, and it’s not that we’re not confident, it’s that we’ve been culturally conditioned from a young age that or. Almost just messages that you might have heard from your father or an uncle? The way that I heard messages over the last few days, spending time with my dad’s side of the family, I mean to the point where it was like, oh, women can can’t do these certain things, but men can.

Or when I remarry, I want a wife who’s gonna like cook and clean and work really, really [00:05:00] hard. But I also want her to get a job because I don’t want somebody that like just stays at home. I want her to get a job, but I also want her to be there and manage the house and serve me. And I’m, you know, my mind is blown hearing these things.

I’m like, are you effing kidding me? There was even a few moments in which. I don’t even think it happened consciously, but my voice was so diminished. And mind you, I am a 30 5-year-old. Am I 35? Yeah, I’m 35. I was like, how old am I? I am a 30 5-year-old entrepreneur that has an education, probably a higher education than a lot of people in that room.

And I would say something and it would be kind of diminished, and then like I’d be interrupted by a guy. So as these things occur. I’m reminded that this fear of being seen isn’t a confidence issue. It’s literally a cultural conditioning that we’ve been raised to believe our voice doesn’t matter, and it’s unfortunate and it’s not even true. So whether [00:06:00] it was something that was. Overtly or covertly, either very in your face or indirectly stated. The messages that we were raised with a lot of us is that staying small, staying quiet, being agreeable is the best thing a woman can do, and that if you are a person to speak up or speak out, you might be judged.

Right? Oh, that’s a, a term I always remember hearing when I was much younger. Or like this cultural conditioning of like, don’t bring shame to the family. That’s relevant for a lot of different cultures. I’m going to come back to this cultural conditioning, but let’s really talk about what it is that we are fearing whenever we are afraid of being seen. The first thing is that we are afraid of being judged. We are thinking, what are people going to think? What are they going to say? So let’s use my clients as an example.

During the visibility challenge, I give them a daily prompt and they start off really easy, and then they get a little bit more challenging. So the first few days, [00:07:00] today’s prompt was, tell us something that you are grateful for. Yesterday’s prompt was, share a fun fact about yourself. So these are pretty lighthearted, not too vulnerable things to to share. But this overthinking that’s been going on is all about what will people think? what will people say? What if I get it wrong? That’s a huge one. There’s this fear of saying the wrong thing or maybe being misinterpreted, especially in this cancel culture. It makes so much sense that this is a fear. Or what if you are corrected publicly? Like I’ll never forget, I created a video for courage driven Latina, and I misspelled the word courage and I didn’t misspell it. I, I had all the correct letters, but I switched the order of the O and the U, and I was corrected by a guy that I was talking to at the time.

You can imagine the embarrassment that I felt, and I know that I’m lightweight, dyslexic. It’s not crazy, but I am dyslexic. So [00:08:00] this idea of like, oh my gosh, what if I get it wrong? Or like, what if I felt something wrong or what about this, but all of this makes you human. And guess what? I survived. I’ve also posted things that people didn’t agree with.

PE people misinterpreted it, especially when I was very active on TikTok. I posted something that was more on the political side and I had people. That were totally not part of my political party in my dms emailing me like it was not fun, but I survived. I survived and I learned more about what kind of content I wanna post and I wanna ensure.

And then I decided from that moment that I was going to post content that felt very authentic to me. The video that I posted back then, it is nothing like what I post now. It was just like on a whim I just kind of reshared something. So the other thing that we fear is the fear of success, believe it or not, right? So we’re afraid of failure. We don’t wanna mess up. We don’t want to publicly start an Instagram page and then have it [00:09:00] totally flop or start a TikTok page or start a business and then have it flop. So we’re definitely afraid of failure and we, that’s where our perfectionism comes up.

But we’re also very much afraid of success because we feel like if we’re too successful, we might outgrow our friendships, we might outgrow our relationships. We might no longer relate to the community that we once related to, and that is a big, big fear as well. So I wanna say that all of these fears are so valid, but none of these fears are actually concrete real things. As in, of course they could happen, but In my experience, it’s very rare for these things to happen. You think that people, let’s just, I’m gonna quickly debunk the fears that I just talked about. So if you are feeling fearing judgment that people are going to judge you, and what are they going to say or what are they going to think about you?

If I’ve learned anything in my five years of being a full-time [00:10:00] entrepreneur and my six years of creating content, it’s that people are so not worried about you. They’re more worried about themselves. So you’re looking at this thinking, what are people going to think or say about me? When what’s actually happening is they’re going to look at your content and be like, how can this help me?

What? How is this relevant to me? Everybody’s always thinking about life from their own perspective. They’re not looking at life to completely judge you. They’re looking at your content thinking, how can this benefit me? A fear of saying the wrong thing. You have to know that people may not understand what you’re saying and that’s okay.

My content is so not for everybody. There’s been a few times when my content went viral and as soon as it reached people who were not in my target audience, they were just trying to argue with me about it. The way that you overcome that fear is you have to decide who is this piece of content for, or who is this message for and how is it? I want them to [00:11:00] hear this and forget about anybody else. You have to decide who it’s for and create it for that person and allow yourself to be misunderstood by other people, and it takes practice to do this.

Now, if you’re afraid of failure, I wanna remind you that most people do not even try. You think failure is going to be this like. Crazy public thing. Usually failure is, it’s just when you stop trying, nobody’s checking your stuff to see if you’ve succeeded or if you’ve failed. Usually people start paying attention once you start blowing up.

Besides that, they’re not worried that much. And then fear of success. It’s human nature to wanna stay in our comfort zone, but the more successful you become, the more people you meet who are going, where you’re going, and you find the most aligned community. I think back to when I really wanted to start. A business and I really wanted to start posting content and I had all of these fears.

Believe it or not, I had all of ’em. And if I would’ve never started, [00:12:00] I wouldn’t have the amazing friend group that I have now. These are amazing friends that I can go to.  In our group chat any day of the week and ask for support with, they are friends who believe in me. When I don’t believe in myself, I truly think if I didn’t have this friend group, I would’ve already given up on my business a long time ago.

So all of these fears, obviously I talked to it from the, I talked about it from the aspect of content creation, but you can also debunk these fears with just allowing yourself to be seen with speaking up at a work meeting.  when you’re overthinking an email, remind yourself of how to overcome these fears.

Like I just went through them right now. [00:13:00] [00:14:00] [00:15:00] Now, let’s come back. Now that we’ve understood kind of the root of this fear, let’s talk about the cultural conditioning that I was talking about earlier. Because this isn’t about blaming individual people. It’s about naming a system that wasn’t built for women to succeed. I mean, if we really think about, women couldn’t get their own line of credit until, I believe the seventies. We [00:16:00] couldn’t get our own mortgage until, I don’t even know when, let me quickly search for this.

women could not legally get their own credit cards in the United States until 1974. That’s freaking crazy. And most of our parents were born way before then, most of them in in Mexico. So it makes sense that we’ve been fed this. Message that our voice doesn’t matter. And even if we are these educated women, even though we have access to American jobs, I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast fit in this category.

If you identify as first gen or even if you don’t, right? Like you just have, if you’re listening to this podcast, you have access to self-development and bettering yourself. And I find it to be this crazy thing that we are a generation of educated, intelligent. Inner work, doing the inner work cycle breakers, maybe the first in our family to go to therapy, maybe the first in our family to work in [00:17:00] corporate America, maybe making more money than our parents, right?

So we have all of these privileges and yet we come from families where we, or culture that. Limits us in so many ways, and I find that the friction between these two things is what makes being seen so difficult. It’s what makes showing up so difficult because we’ve got a lot to say. We are some educated, smart, intelligent.

Self-aware women, but when you come from a culture that has constantly fed you, this isn’t even about our logical brain anymore. This is cultural conditioning that is built into our subconscious that even if you want to speak up and show up, that’s why it’s so difficult. But just like the cultural conditioning occurred to fear the visibility, we can also do the opposite.

We can also find safety in using our voice, and this a lot of [00:18:00] times comes from taking the action and seeing that you didn’t pass out, seeing that you survived. You literally have to create safety in your body and create new neural pathways, new connections in your brain for showing up. So in summary, you live in a completely different world than in the one that raised you, but that home reality still has power over you. Why? Because we’re all human beings and we all want our family’s approval. We all want our parents’ approval. It may not be a super conscious desire, but it is there. 

So if you are listening to this, and this is all resonating with you, I want you to know that you don’t lack confidence. You don’t need more confidence. Confidence comes as a byproduct of taking the action. What’s more important is identifying the fears, identifying where you learned this conditioning, and then questioning it and then reprogramming [00:19:00] it. So if this is resonating with you, I want you to know that you are not alone. This is what I’ve seen in myself. It’s what I’ve seen in my clients. I want you to know that there is nothing wrong with you. I. And if you have a desire of allowing yourself to be seen, whether it’s speaking up in meetings, creating content on social media, starting a business, or anything that requires you to be seen. Then it is so possible for you, and I’m seeing it happen in this visibility challenge with my clients because what I’m seeing is that these women are feeling the fear they are working to regulate their nervous system because every day I also give them something to regulate with their nervous system, and they are leading with courage and they are posting anyway.

What this is teaching is it’s teaching them that they are safe to show up. It’s teaching them to trust themselves, to trust their voice and teaching that when they express themselves, nobody’s going to come, shame them and nobody’s going to come. [00:20:00] Punish them like maybe it once happened when they were much younger. And doing it alongside community is a great way to create safety because they’re all afraid and they’re all still taking action and they’re supporting one another and cheering each other on. So community is so important and you know, I want you to think about when you were much younger, the community that you had around you were people who had these different views that maybe created this tension and this fear around being seen.

So now it’s. Important that you surround yourself by other people who are going where you’re going. So we have covered a lot in this short but sweet episode. We talked about the different fears of being seen, like what those fears are underneath, such as the fear of failure. The fear of being judged, the fear of success, or the fear of getting it wrong. We also talked about where this fear comes from and how it’s not because you’re not confident, it’s not because you’re not prepared.

It’s not because you’re not capable, but it’s because we grew up in this dual environment [00:21:00] where at home and when you were maybe much younger or just what culture has taught you or What your culture, what tradition has taught you is that women should be seen and not heard. That we should be humble.

We shouldn’t take up too much space, and yet you are this powerful, educated, self-aware individual that has so much to say, and I’ll leave you with this. When somebody has the desire to create, specifically, let’s say that they wanna create content and they’re so worried about what other people think.

What I usually say to my clients is I talk to them about the spotlight framework. When we’re worried about how we look, how we sound, what people will think about us. We have the spotlight on ourselves. But typically when women want to create content, it’s not because they wanna be selfish, it’s because they wanna create an impact.

It’s because they want to serve. It’s because they know something that they can help other people [00:22:00] also learn. And when you take the spotlight off of yourself and put it on your, the people that you want to serve, it’s so much easier to show up. And that’s exactly what my clients are doing inside of the Visibility challenge. If this podcast episode resonated with you and you would like my help with showing up with building your personal brand, then I have two things I wanna share with you. The first is that I have a free resource to help you identify your personal brand. It’s called Manifest Your Mar, and I’ll leave the link for that down below.

And I also want to let you know that I just have a few spots left for my personal branding intensive. So if this podcast was like, yep, this. Speaks to my soul. I know I wanna be showing up, but I resonate with all of this. Then I invite you to book a personal branding intensive with me.

It’s a 90 minute one-on-one you and I completely private, where I help you identify your personal brand. I help you overcome the fears and the different blocks that you’ve been [00:23:00] maybe experiencing. And I also support you with a plan for how to show up.

So if you’ve been wanting to work with me and you’ve been waiting for me to open doors for Courage Driven Latina, again, this is a great way to work with me because we get to work with each other one-on-one, and you’ll get an amazing head start. And after that, when I open doors again, if you wanna join us inside of Courage Driven Latina, you totally can so that you can also take part in this visibility challenge that I just talked about.

Okay, y’all, thank you so much for sticking with me. Thank you for listening to this podcast episode. I want you to know that your voice is so, so powerful, and it’s so needed and we need to hear it. And unfortunately, we have a beautiful, beautiful culture that I love so much. I’m in Mexico and I’m loving life, but I also had these moments where I was reminded that some people might not have the same mindset as we do, and that doesn’t mean that.

Your voice doesn’t matter. I actually think that should be motivation [00:24:00] for you to speak your mind and always lead with a voice of service and with love, and you yourself, regardless of what happens with, like let’s say you say something, but you know you meant it with intention. Your conscious is clear.

Okay, y’all, thank you for spending some time with me and I will see you next week. Bye. [00:25:00]