Have you ever known it was time for something new, but fear kept giving you reasons to stay exactly where you are? Fear can sound practical. It tells you you're not ready, that the timing isn't right, that you've already been through too much, or that it's safer not to even try.

But sometimes the very thing standing between where you are and where you're called to go is the decision to stop letting fear make the final call.

That's exactly what we dug into on this episode of the Making of a Mompreneur show, as part of our Self Love September series. I'm your host, Rasheeda Green, founder and CEO of Get Right Coaching and creator of the Digimompreneur Academy, where we help moms find the time, money, and location freedom to build businesses without neglecting themselves or their families in the process. This month we've been looking beyond the surface of self-care to talk about what it really means to value yourself enough to heal, grow, set boundaries, and pursue your purpose.

Joining me for this conversation was Maryanne Rivera Dannert, an author of more than 20 published anthologies and two guided journals, a certified life and leadership coach, and the voice behind a podcast that's rebranding this September to The Maryanne Show. Maryanne's message isn't something she just teaches. It's something she's lived, and she brought both professional expertise and hard-won personal insight to our conversation about how to stop letting fear control your next chapter.

What Fear Actually Stands For

Most of us have heard the acronym: fear stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. Maryanne offered a different version, one built from her own life.

For her, fear stands for feeling empty, abandoned, and rejected.

As a people pleaser from a young age, she stopped simply doing things and started performing instead. She didn't want to feel empty. She didn't want to feel abandoned. And she didn't want to be rejected. Her biological parents divorced when she was young, and shortly after, her mother and stepfather left her with her grandmother for a stretch while they moved from Puerto Rico to Florida for work. As a four, five, six year old, she didn't understand any of that. All she knew was that the people around her kept leaving, and somewhere in there she decided something must be wrong with her.

So she built a version of herself designed to keep people close.

Maryanne breaks fear down into three possible origins. It's either passed down to you by the people who raised you, absorbed from something you saw or heard, on TV, in a movie, in a song, or on the news, or it's rooted in something that actually happened to you directly. Whatever is keeping you stuck right now, whether it's starting a business, leaving one, or switching jobs entirely, she suggests pausing to ask where that fear actually came from. Naming its source is the first step to loosening its grip.

Self-Doubt, Imposter Syndrome, and People-Pleasing Are All Fear in Disguise

A lot of the moms in our community carry guilt, self-doubt, and perfectionism like they're just part of who they are. Maryanne connects all three straight back to fear.

Those labels and expectations were placed on us early, often by whoever raised us, whether that was a parent, a foster guardian, or someone else entirely. If you were told "don't do this because X, Y, Z could happen," that's fear talking, and it's been quietly shaping your decisions ever since.

People-pleasing works the same way. As women, we're natural nurturers, and we want connection. So we start performing from an early age to secure that connection, except what we end up building is a false version of belonging rather than the real thing. Imposter syndrome follows a similar pattern. The more a negative label gets repeated, whether by a parent or a past relationship, the deeper it settles into your subconscious, until it starts showing up as your actual behavior.

Maryanne compares the process of undoing this to peeling an onion. You work backward, layer by layer, until you find the root. And there's real research behind the fix: for every negative word spoken over you, it takes three to five positive ones to counteract it. That's not a one-time pep talk. That's ongoing self-coaching, reprogramming your thoughts on purpose so the negativity doesn't calcify into your personality.

Becoming the Common Denominator, and Choosing to Change It

Maryanne got personal about her own reckoning with fear. She started dating at 14 or 15 and didn't spend a single day living alone until she was 34. She moved from relationship to relationship, then had children, all while that same fear of being empty, abandoned, and rejected quietly ran the show.

After leaving a toxic relationship, she prayed a different kind of prayer. She told God she was the common denominator in every relationship that hadn't worked, and that it was time to focus on herself and her children instead of chasing the next person to fill the gap. It was terrifying. She'd never been on her own before.

She ended up meeting her now-husband not long after, and this week they're celebrating 18 years of marriage. But what made that relationship different wasn't luck. It was the work she'd already started doing. When they first got together, she told him everything in the first week: the good, the bad, the ugly, the past relationships, the divorce, the trauma. She wanted it all on the table so he could make an informed choice. He chose to stay.

The real shift, though, happened before he ever showed up. Maryanne got clear on her values by taking a list of 100 random words and, against a timer, narrowing them down from twenty to ten to five to three. Her three: community, happiness, and belonging. Every decision she makes, whether it's taking on a client, saying yes to a project, or planning a vacation, gets run through that filter. Your values don't tend to change, she says. Just their order does.

From there came the boundaries. She started saying no to people, places, and things that didn't align with those values, and it was hard. As a recovering people pleaser, disappointing others felt unbearable. But she reframed it: if she kept prioritizing everyone else's feelings over her own, she'd end up disappointing herself instead, and she'd be the one left stuck while everyone else moved on with their lives.

Fear Is Doing Its Job. You Still Get to Move Anyway

Before we wrapped, Maryanne made a point worth sitting with: fear serves a purpose. It shows up to protect you from stepping into the unknown. But more often than not, once you decide enough is enough and take the leap anyway, you land and realize you survived. You made it. You didn't know what you didn't know, and now you do.

We closed things out with a quick round of rapid-fire questions. Feel the fear and do it anyway? Yes. Journal it out or talk it out? Talk it out. Can courage and fear exist at the same time? Absolutely true.

If this conversation stirred something in you, that's the point. Self Love September is about looking past the surface-level version of self-care and doing the real work: getting clear on your values, setting boundaries that protect your energy, and leaning into your faith when the next step feels uncertain. Fear is going to keep showing up. The question is whether you let it write your next chapter, or you do.

You can find Maryanne at marianriveradannert.com, on Facebook under MRD Empowerment Solutions, and on Instagram @therealmarianriveradannert. And you can catch us every week on the Making of a Mompreneur show, right here in the MompreneurHQ community. Join us as we keep celebrating Self Love September, because self-care isn't selfish. You have to have a full cup to pour out to anyone else.