Today I want to talk to you about fear, paralyzing terrifying fear, how it affects us, what it causes us to do and some of the scenarios where you might experience fear and how to overcome that in your journey both in your personal life and in your professional life.
The two biggest fears that most people face are the fear of success and the fear of failure.
They are the opposites of each other, so this idea might sound a little bit weird, but these fears are typically experienced by different types of people.
Now, the fear of success is typically experienced when you are not sure what to do next.
The idea behind this is if I succeed, if I am actually successful trying to accomplish this goal in front of me, then what’s the next step, and if you don’t have a plan laid out for your path, then you might struggle at some point, due to a subconscious fear of success.
You may not know what’s coming next, you may not know what the next steps are after you complete your short-term goal, therefore you may stymie yourself, you may find unintentional roadblocks because you’re not sure of the next steps after you achieve some short-term success.
On the other side of this we have the fear of failure, and this is the one more people can probably relate to, it’s the idea that what if I can’t do it, what if my goal is too big, what if what I’m trying to accomplish is just not manageable by me, how do I get there, what’s the right process, and ultimately, we self-sabotage and we create our problems for ourselves, whether it’s fear of success or fear of failure, we may self-sabotage.
A good example of self-sabotage might be knowing that you have five components of a project that need to be done before you can launch the project, but rather than focusing on the first one, completing it then going to the second component, and working through the process with some sense of order, maybe we jump from step one, to step three, to step five and back to step two without ever completing any part of the project.
We feel like we’re getting stuff done, we’re spending time working on the project but we’re not doing it in a sensible manner. We’re not doing it with any type of laid out process, so it takes much longer for that project to be accomplished because we’re not creating and sticking to a solid game plan. It may be very subtle, we may not realize that it’s fear that we are experiencing, we may just be stuck in a rut, we may not be focusing well, we may not be on top of our game, we may not be using our knowledge, skills, capabilities and expertise to our advantage.
The point is, when you start struggling, when you find yourself in the middle of something and it doesn’t really feel like it’s moving forward, you don’t really feel like you’re accomplishing anything, oftentimes the root cause can be some type of internal fear.
The best steps when dealing with fear, whether it’s fear of success or fear of failure, is to create an action plan, work with others that are experienced with your goal, use them as mentors and leverage their knowledge and expertise, bounce ideas off them, get feedback from them, find out if what you are doing makes sense and if you are moving in the right direction.
When working with talented, experienced professionals, they will be able to point you in the next direction and you’ll always have a sounding board, whenever you run into an obstacle, whenever you find a challenge along the way, you have someone to talk to and work with that can help guide you, so you don’t drift without a course of action, you don’t get stuck.
It comes down to a three-step process
- Create a plan of action
- Find a mentor, a consultant or an expert
- Take action every single day
Whether your action is a small component or a big component of your plan, take action every day, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours or whatever time you can find to put into your project, and you will compound the effects of small actions over a long period of time and ultimately you will succeed.
With these actions you can create anything, even completing projects that you may have never thought were possible.
This works in your personal life, it works in your business life, it works on side projects outside of your business, it works if you are an entrepreneur and you need to work in the business on a daily basis, but you also need to work on the business outside of business hours.
When you are working on the structure of your business you may not have time to do that during business hours, setting up your systems and processes and the different ways the business should interact with itself, the way marketing should look, the way sales should look, the way those systems should work together, the way sales should transition projects to the operations team, etc.
But even if you spend 15 to 60 minutes a day building these processes and systems, in a relatively quick timeframe you will be able to put together a very robust operations manual for your business and develop your own internal processes and procedures.
To recap, if you find yourself or your business struggling, if you find yourself in a pit of despair somewhere along the way and you are not sure what to do next, or you are overcome by fear of success or failure or of the unknown, the best steps to overcome fear or challenges are to:
- Create a plan of action
- Look for mentors, people who have done it before you and get advice
- Take action on a daily basis
