Almost everyone I talk to experiences the FEAR of FAILURE. People often say it’s one of the main reasons that holds them back.
Many ask me if I can help them to live without fear.
I always tell them – no.
Because being able to feel fear is an important part of being human.
It’s required for us. Whenever we stretch ourselves, fears come up to keep us safe!
How to live without failures, however, is an interesting topic.
It doesn’t matter if we have absolute clarity of where we want to get to, we all know HOW we might “fail”.
Seriously, stop reading and ask yourself now – “how might I fail if I don’t get to my goals in a year?”
Do you have a few answers?
Using myself as an example – my goal is to get to $300K revenue in my coaching business in a year. Here are 6 very likely ways for me to fail:
- Do nothing. This happens when I let fear hold me up, when I don’t believe in myself, or when I only think about how others would judge me. The fear of failure becomes ridiculous. Because I already failed anyway. I fail ahead of time by doing nothing.
- I do the same thing over and over again but expect the outcome to be different. When I cling strongly to my old stories or cultural conditionings, I resist change. When I don’t invest in myself or do things that scare me, I become stagnant. When I don’t evolve myself, it is expected my outcome (or income) won’t change. Yet, I sometimes still wish for a different outcome.
- I don’t ask for what I REALLY want. Sometimes I don’t really know what I want. Sometimes I’m worried about burdening others. Often time it’s the fear of rejection. I secretly picture what people would really think if I ask for 30k for people to work with me for a year. Crazy right? Even I have a knee-jerk reaction to the number. All the doubts and insecurity come up when I think about the number. But, how is it possible to get anything or go anywhere, if I don’t ask for what I want?
- I take things personally. I hear NOs probably half of the time from my proposals. I sometimes take it personally – like “I haven’t served them powerful enough” or “they don’t think I am worth the money”. Or, worse – “I don’t think I’m worth the money”. Money here can be replaced with anything like love, time, attention etc. When I take things personally, I become paralyzed. Recovering from it takes all my energy.
- I don’t take care of my body or my mind. An unhealthy mind serves no one. An unhealthy body creates no miracles. It can take more than a year to recover from burnout. That’s way more costly.
- I try to do it all by myself. Being a solopreneur, I have no one to bounce ideas around. There is no direct feedback on how I’m doing. There is no one to share responsibilities with. It’s all me! I feel the need to figure out EVERYTHING by myself. It’s a lot of freedom but sometimes it gets chaotic. Moreover, it can get very lonely.
How many can you relate to?
I love these seemingly “negative” answers. Because having the awareness is the KEY to turn each one around if we choose to unstuck ourselves.
- Do something. It’s not failure if we learn something. If we have to label things as failure, we might as well choose to fail forward!
- Identify old patterns and evolve ourselves. How we do one thing is how we do everything. When we identify our old patterns and choose to shift them. The whole world looks differently. As long as we continue to evolve, we are CREATING different outcomes. It’s like playing the game of life to see where we can eventually get to!
- Ask for what we really want – in the worst case scenario, we might not get it. But the best case is – we might just get it!
- Be curious about others. Instead of making everything all about us, be curious about why others act certain ways. Ask clarifying questions. More often than not, it really has nothing to do with us.
- Take care of our mind and body. Do it before we even need to think about “the oxygen mask”.
- Create a supportive environment. Who would we like to celebrate our success with? What support do we need to get back up when we are down? I surrounded myself with what I called loving guardrails.😂 Some call it the board of directors. I have my own life coach, business coach, groups, partner, and accountability buddy. I have people call me out when I make myself small. I can lean on people when I need to.
How about you?
How might you fail?
How willing are you to turn it around?
Love, Wen