What Winning My First Pitch Competition Taught Me About Fear

I am my own biggest critic.

I don’t really know why I’m so hard of myself but that’s beside the point.

A few weeks ago I took a huge leap of faith and decided to enter my start up, The Black Girl Group into a local business expo pitch competiton. I had been talking about it for weeks but Saturday night I started to feel a bit of anxiety.

“I can’t do this. I’m not ready,” I said to the organizer of the event.

“You can do it, see you tomorrow,” she said.

Great.

I’m really going to have to pitch and I’m not even sure I can do this.

Despite how I felt I chose to keep preparing and simply hoping for the best.

The next morning, I woke up and to my surprise for teh first time in my life, I lost my voice.

Perfect.

Now I really have a reason not to this, I said to myself.

“The joy is the lord is your strength, let me know how the pitch goes,” my mom said to me after I texted her to tell her how I planned to back out of the competition.

Nobody is really going to let me step away from this opportnity.

Can I get a little bit of sympathy?

I guess not.

With no voice and a ton of anxiety, I arrived to the event wondering how I was going to be able to pitch this great idea with no voice.

The joy of the lord is your strength, I reminded myself.

For one minute it really was.

As I stepped to mic and began my pitch I couldn’t believe how the words just seemed to flow out of my mouth confidently. I answered every question without hesitation and after it was over, my voice disappeared yet again.

As I anticipated to hear the results, I was on pens and needles. There’s no way I’m going to win this competition. Everyone else seemed much more prepared than I was and I feel like crap, I said to myself as I held my two year old in my arms awaiting the judges results.

Our winner is…..”Black Girl Group”

What?

Me?

I won?

No way. I thought to myself. This isn’t real.

As those around me edged me on to go forward, I had to hold back the tears because I couldn’t believe I had just won a competition that I had only hours earlier tried to back out of.

What if I had never shown up?

What if I had allowed my anxiety to keep me from participating?

Bet yet what if I had called out sick?

All these thoughts raced through my mind and in an instant I was reminded that when God opens a door our job isn’t to move out of the way, our job is to just keep walking through the door that’s in front of us.