Fear of Failure

As already said, entrepreneurs are always trying new things. We’re going on a journey without a road map. We’re often doing things we’re not very good at. We’re blazing a trail.

It is therefore a given that we’re going to make mistakes, do things wrong and experience failure.

That’s actually not a problem.

The problem is that we see it as a problem!

The perfect model is that of a baby learning to walk. A learner-walker will fall many, many times before she masters walking. But she doesn’t get frustrated, or upset. She doesn’t decide that she’s obviously not cut out for this walking lark and so gives up. She just literally picks herself up and tries again. Each time she improves. She’s adjusting her skills based on what didn’t work before. She’s balancing better and holding herself better. This feedback-based improvement is subconscious, but it’s no less real for that. She’s also strengthening her muscles with each walking attempt. And, eventually she gets there and becomes a champion walker.

Each of us was that baby. Each of us mastered so many skills as well as walking. These are skills that we take so much for granted now that we forget just how huge they were: skills like successfully bringing food on a spoon to a mouth we could not see; like learning to dress ourselves including tricky things like zips and buttons; and even the skill of speech itself.

If we could approach our ‘mistakes’ as an entrepreneur with the same serenity and unconcern as that baby views her 'mistakes', we could not help but succeed.

The problem is that we lost the ability to be so serene and unconcerned. Our whole culture has lost it in many ways.

I think that our schooling has a huge amount to answer for this. In school, it’s so important to get things right. We’re penalised for getting things wrong. We can often be laughed at and derided for making mistakes. No wonder we come to fear it.

There's an argument that our modern schooling system, product of the industrial revolution as it is, is all about producing good employees. Employees are expected to get it right every time (especially junior employees). But as entrepreneurs we experience different demands. We need to unlearn those lessons we learned in school. And normally that would be difficult, as those lessons are deeply learned and entrenched. But with the tools I share, it's now easy to let go that out-of-date programming.

It is true to say: the more comfortable we are with failure, the more inevitable is our eventual success.

This absolutely does not mean that we will ever like failure, or seek it, or be careless about things. It means just seeing failures as steps on the road to success. It means not wasting energy in bemoaning the failure or taking it as a sign that we’re doomed to never succeed or any other negative meaning on it. It means learning from that ‘failure’, adjusting our plan based on the feedback that ‘failure’ gave us, and moving on.

I remember hearing once: The difference between millionaires and ordinary people is that whereas ordinary people have failures, millionaires have learning curves.

That’s very profound when you think about it. The same experiences; simply defined differently, and hence leading to different outcomes.

Of course, it's not enough to know this rationally and conciously. Your subconcious has to know it too. EFT is the best tool I know for reprogramming your subconsious with empowering beliefs. I can help you stride forward fearlessly.

Contact me to discuss it.