When fear is egocentric

Yesterday I went to a Pilates class hosted by an instructor I had not met before. I enjoyed the class; it was well paced and easy to follow along. After the class we lingered and chatted for a bit. The instructor shared that she recently started teaching and that every time she is in front of a class she is afraid she is doing a bad job. She is concerned that they may hate the class, that they think she is a bad instructor. “I am always met by this wall of blank or puzzled faces,” she said. And there it is again-that fear of not being good enough. Most likely the people in her class are just busy concentrating, working through a particularly tedious and onerous exercise (Pilates offers a plethora of them). Most likely, the indifferent or dismayed faces have nothing to do with her, it is just hard doing circles in the air with one leg while your butt is burning. All I had to offer was the cliched advice that it really isn't about you. It is about them. And if we really cared mostly about them, would we not ask for direct feedback. What can I improve? The problem when we operate from an assumption of insufficiency is that we tend to look for evidence to the contrary: we are only receptive to praise. Anything else wounds our already fragile ego. The secret, according to Cheri Huber, author of The Fear Book, is to disidentify; to not let egocentricity be in charge. Because, really, what would the world look like if we chose to look at it from a different perspective. What if, instead of asking ourselves "Am I good enough?" we stopped and thought about the reason we are asking ourselves that question in the first place. Isn’t it a bit self-centered?