The common denominator among the high-powered, high-ranking women Sandy Grigsby—founder of Brio Five, a portrait photography and branding studio—photographs is that they truly don’t believe they’re as beautiful as they really are.

"They might know they're good at something, but they don’t know they’re beautiful, and that affects everything," Sandy told BTI. "Each woman's lack of confidence with her own physical being is very obvious and affects different areas of her life. But there’s always a bigger problem at play, and more often than not, that problem is fear."

The story here isn't that people questions and compares themselves—because of course they do. Before Sandy started transforming her clients in front of the camera to reflect the versions they felt like, instead of what they had seen, she too used to struggled with self-esteem, especially when working as a model. It wasn't until she started noticing patterns of thought that were prevalent within herself and among her peers that she knew how to change it. 

“I’m sure you’ve had a friend who you look at and think ‘she’s so smart and beautiful but she won’t leave that shitty job or shitty boyfriend.’ You know what’s wrong with her. It’s fear. Fear comes from these three things: Loss. Less. Never. I will lose something. I will have less of something. I will never have something. We’re all afraid, but if you stop focusing on those three things, haven’t you always survived? That’s how the mindset I used to survive and succeed," says Sandy.

To Sandy, we're all asking the wrong questions about ourselves.

"My primary questions used to be 'What's wrong with me?' and 'Why am I not enough?' or 'Why don't I have this?' But those are the wrong questions, and they all stem from fear. If you look at someone who started a business and failed—if you look at their path, a lot of times they got to a certain point, and then they stopped. But if they would have just taken that next step, their business would have exploded. But it didn't, because they're so afraid."

And then there are those of us who view ourselves as victims of circumstance, who look at those who are more fortunate, and envy that life, says Grigsby, but "if everything was handed to us on a platter, what fuck-ups would we be?"

So what should we do when fear creeps up on us?

"It's okay to be afraid as long as you know how to tackle it," says Grigsby.  "There are days when I wake up and I tell myself 'I love my life, today is a perfect day, it's going to be amazing!' and then I look down at my phone and some jerk just said something nasty on Facebook, or a person I didn't want to hear from contacts me, or someone dies...and I know I have to keep going. I'm afraid...but I have courage. And all courage is, is: I'm afraid...but I'm doing something about it."