First, do the thing that scares you

A phrase you may have heard me say is, “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.” I’m a believer that the things that scare us are often what propel us forward in life.

This is certainly true in travel. Pushing past our comfort zone and exploring the world allows us to gain perspective and grow.

But it’s true in business, too.

In my first marketing gig, I created and distributed a monthly newsletter as part of my role. When I started, we only had about 15 subscribers, but I was still so nervous every time I hit send. I created all the content and was totally responsible for the whole process, start to finish. If there was a mistake, it was all on me.

I know I’m not alone in this feeling of nervousness. Putting your work into the world is scary. The clever folks at MailChimp (which we used to distribute the newsletter) even had a graphic which illustrated that feeling of nervousness.

Above the “Send” button, you see this gif:

That’s how it feels, hovering over the send button.

And as our email list grew, that fear didn’t go away. I had the same nervousness at 100 subscribers and 1000 subscribers as I did at 15.

In fact, I still feel that same fear in my work today. Whether I need to have tough conversations about management issues, present my ideas to the leadership team, or send an important email, I have that same sweaty-palm stress I did back when I was sending those first marketing emails. It doesn’t change, and I don’t want it to.

In business, like in life, a healthy level of fear can be a really good thing.

Start with fear

Facing our fears means we’re motivated to prepare for the worst. My way of doing this is to make lists. They’re not to-do lists in the traditional sense, but lists of all the things I’m afraid of today.

Then I do the scariest thing first.

For me, fear becomes demotivating if I let it become stress, and it becomes stress if I don’t acknowledge the fears and prepare for them. As soon as I recognize the fear for what it is, I can harness it and let it motivate me.

But when I don’t — when I don’t name it and look squarely at it — it weighs me down, holds me back, and snowballs.

Not long ago, I flew to a leadership meeting in Cambodia. I was asked to present to budget for this year, which included a plan to grow a 70 million dollar business.

Sitting there, waiting for my turn to speak, I felt that familiar hand-hovering-above-the-send-button self-doubt I’d felt all those years ago. What if my proposal wasn’t perfect? What if it was a total flop?

But, as always, I knew I had to do it. I had to take the risk and hope for the best.

Maybe the perfect business idea isn’t even a business, it’s just a thought in someone’s head. Maybe the perfect painting or song or story exists in the brain of some unknown person living in a basement apartment somewhere.

But I’ll take real art, real business, any day—the projects that make it from our brains to the real world, all messy and iterative. Progress is, as always, better than perfection.

Don’t be a fearless leader

I don’t want to be a fearless leader. I want to acknowledge my fears and share them openly. I don’t want my worries to weigh on others, but I want to show my team all sides of myself, not just the fearless ones.

Over the last year, we launched our website Adventure.com. This project took months and months of work, and we brought together a brilliant team to fill the site with beautiful stories and photographs from around the world.

We knew you only have one chance for a first impression, and we wanted everything to be perfect.

Like with many projects, the desire for perfection totally held up the process. We wouldn’t settle for anything less than the best, and although that meant that we were proud of the final product, it also meant things took longer than we’d planned, and that can be hugely stressful on a team.

We hovered over the publish button. When you put your creative work out into the world, it’s scary because it means being vulnerable.

As the leader of the project, I had to be the one to know when it was ready. I had to show my team that it’s safe to take risks and be vulnerable, and that meant pushing through my own fears first.

I know I’m not fearless, and I don’t want to be. My hands will always shake as I push send. My heart will always go in my mouth. But the moment I stop feeling that, I know I need to change something. It means I’m not challenging myself.

And, as we know, if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.

This article originally appeared on Medium - "First, do the thing that scares you" on May 29, 2016.