Over the weekend, I attended a copywriting workshop in Florence, Italy. If you don’t know Laura Belgray, the woman who conducted the workshop, you really should. Her emails and sales content are the bomb.  Her subject lines are so sexy I click on them each and every time. Trust me, that’s no easy feat, getting people to open your emails fifteen seconds after they hit the ole’ inbox.

Whenever I go to a conference where there are a lot of people–meaning, more than four– my tendency is to hang back and observe. To nip in and nip out because I feel, well, socially awkward.

Despite my Tony Robbins training, where you’re encouraged to walk up to perfect strangers and hug them, start meaningful conversations with anyone who passes by, I instead corner one unsuspecting person and talk at her until the break is over or she escapes, whichever comes first. See, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to discuss people’s cancer history, their recent divorce, or their inability to hold down a job; others, not so much. If my victim doesn’t cry or back away in horror, I figure I haven’t done my job.

Anyway, one of the women attending the conference is apparently a big deal in the on-line entrepreneurial world.  She’s got a podcast with, like, a million listeners. Over break, when I was hanging back talking about genocide and blood diamonds with a nice jewelry designer from Bali—a totally adorable woman, by the way, who held up nicely under my barrage—the popular podcaster was talking to a romance novelist and inviting her onto her podcast.

I suddenly realized that, once again, I’d been surrounded by opportunities, really amazing opportunities to build my business, and hadn’t spotted them until it was far too late. Per usual, I got in my own way by being myself—cornering innocents and being all intense. By clinging to my comfort zone and talking about just about anything I could think of unrelated to my business.

I tell you this story because I have no doubt that you do this shit too. You know it’s time to write a book to build your brand (or finish that manuscript smoldering in the bottom drawer), to take your career to a whole nother level, but you keep hanging back and being all awkward. Because, really, you’re actually terrified to put yourself out there in any substantive way. To talk about what it is that you do because….

Why? Why do we do this to ourselves?

Insert a whole assortment of fears.

The truth is that all of those nice people around you, the ones willing to talk about what they do to anyone who will listen, are getting the opportunities you want because you’re hanging off to the sidelines being awkward as fuck. 

So what say we stop doing that? What say we start taking our business (and ourselves) that much more seriously. Showing up in a big way live and in person and in the pages of our books.