Who Do You Think You Are? The Fear of Being Seen and Choosing to Step Forward Anyway

I've owned christinejhiggins.com for three years.

Three years.

Every year I would look at it and think, This is the year I'm going to move my business over to my own name.

And every year, I didn't.

There were plenty of sensible business reasons I could give myself for staying where I was.

People knew Embodied Energy Wellness.

I'd built recognition around the name.

Changing websites and domains was another job on an already very long list.

But if I'm truthful, underneath all of those practical reasons was something much more personal.

A little voice saying:

Who does she think she is?

Who are you to put your own name at the front of everything?

Who are you to become more visible?

What will people think?

And what happens if this actually becomes successful?

When fear disguises itself as practicality

Fear doesn't always feel like fear.

Sometimes it looks like procrastination.

Sometimes it sounds incredibly logical.

I'm not ready yet.

I need another qualification.

I need to get the website perfect first.

I'll do it when the timing is better.

I'll do it when I feel more confident.

And sometimes we can become so good at explaining why we're not doing something that we don't realise we're actually afraid to do it.

I see this in women all the time.

And apparently, I can still see it in myself too.

Recently, after a period of illness forced me to slow down, I had a sudden and incredibly strong urge to reorganise my business.

The Solar Eclipse seemed to add fuel to something that was already stirring.

I felt floored physically, yet creatively something had been lit underneath me.

I looked at everything I had built and realised:

I've outgrown the way I've been presenting my work.

The business needed to evolve because I had evolved.

And suddenly that domain I'd been sitting on for three years didn't feel scary anymore.

It felt obvious.

So I did it.

Embodied Energy Wellness moved home to christinejhiggins.com.

And while technically it was a website change, personally it represented something much bigger.

It was a decision to stop hiding behind a business name and put my own name behind the work I have spent years creating.

Healing isn't a straight line

The experience also reminded me of something I think we sometimes forget in the personal development and wellness world.

Healing is not linear.

We can do years of work on ourselves and still encounter an old fear.

We can become confident and still experience self-doubt.

We can learn boundaries and occasionally find ourselves people-pleasing again.

We can become incredibly self-aware and still get triggered.

We can teach something and still be asked by life to practise it at a deeper level ourselves.

That doesn't mean the work hasn't worked.

It means we're human.

For most of us, growth probably looks much more like:

Two steps forward. One step back. Then forward again.

The difference is that the things that once completely controlled us begin to lose their power.

The fear may still whisper.

But we don't have to hand it the steering wheel.

Fear of failure gets talked about. Fear of success doesn't.

We hear a lot about fear of failure.

But I think fear of success and visibility deserves a much bigger conversation.

Because becoming more visible can feel incredibly vulnerable.

When you put your work, your ideas, your creativity or simply yourself into the world, you create the possibility of judgement.

Someone might disagree.

Someone might criticise.

Someone might roll their eyes.

Someone might even ask:

Who does she think she is?

But here's the question I've had to ask myself:

What happens if I keep making myself smaller so nobody else feels uncomfortable with me becoming bigger?

There comes a point when staying hidden becomes more uncomfortable than being seen.

You can't think your way through every fear

This is also where so much of my work with the Embodied Energy Method™ comes from.

We're often taught that change happens primarily through mindset.

Think positively.

Change the belief.

Push yourself.

Set the goal.

Take action.

And yes, our thoughts matter enormously.

But we're not simply minds walking around carrying bodies underneath them.

Our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing constantly influence one another.

You can consciously want the promotion while another part of you is terrified of the responsibility.

You can desperately want your business to grow while feeling unsafe being visible.

You can want a relationship while protecting yourself from vulnerability.

You can want to slow down while your entire identity has been built around being productive.

That's why sometimes knowing what we should do isn't enough.

We need to understand what is happening underneath it.

In my work, I bring this back to five movements:

Regulate. Release. Reconnect. Realign. Radiate.

Regulate enough to feel safe within yourself.

Release what you're carrying that no longer belongs there.

Reconnect with your body, emotions, intuition and needs.

Realign with what actually matters to you.

And then radiate — allowing yourself to take up space and bring that version of yourself into the world.

Not because fear has completely disappeared.

But because fear is no longer making the decisions.

The next chapter of my work

Moving to christinejhiggins.com has also allowed me to bring the different parts of my work together.

Because what I do today has grown far beyond one type of wellness offering.

My work now includes the Embodied Energy Method™, my 1:1 work, The Balanced Woman™, retreats, events and speaking.

I'm also expanding two areas that feel particularly important to me: Corporate Wellbeing and Student Wellbeing.

At first glance, working with a woman individually, supporting a corporate team and speaking to students might look like completely different things.

But underneath, I see the same human patterns.

Stress.

Pressure.

Disconnection.

Overthinking.

Overdoing.

Difficulty resting.

Fear of getting it wrong.

Trying to meet everyone else's expectations while gradually losing connection with ourselves.

Whether someone is sitting in a classroom, a boardroom or my 1:1 space, we're still talking about human beings learning how to understand themselves better.

And that is where I see this next chapter of my work going.

Not separating spirituality, wellbeing, personal development, education and professional life into completely different boxes.

But recognising the human being who exists underneath all of them.

Maybe it's your turn to step forward

So perhaps there's something you're sitting on too.

An idea.

A career move.

A conversation.

A business.

A book.

A boundary.

An application.

A version of yourself you've been quietly becoming but haven't quite allowed the rest of the world to meet yet.

And maybe, when you think about doing it, that familiar voice appears:

Who do you think you are?

You don't necessarily need to make that voice disappear.

You might simply need to stop obeying it.

Because healing isn't reaching a place where nothing scares you anymore.

Sometimes healing is noticing the fear, understanding where it came from, putting your feet firmly on the ground…

and taking the next step anyway.

Three years later, christinejhiggins.com is finally live.

Maybe I didn't need another three years of confidence.

Maybe I just needed to decide I was ready to be seen.

Christine Higgins
Founder of the Embodied Energy Method™