Your fear is coming from your inner cavewoman, so you must think beyond her to manage her. Here are four great ways to start doing that.
1. Consider Your Thought Options
How we feel is the number-one driver of how we react. When you don’t acknowledge how you feel, it will still affect your responses — you just won’t know it.
When you care about others, you ask how they’re doing. You might even drop in on them or just give them a call. Why not do that with yourself? Drop in on your brain. What’s going on with it?
Our thoughts control our feelings. The goal, the project, other people, the weather, they don’t control how we feel. Our thoughts about the goal, the project, other people, and the weather control our feelings. We can learn how to change how we feel by learning how to choose our thoughts. We have thought options, and depending on the option we choose, we’ll feel a certain way. So we can choose a thought that doesn’t create fear.
For example, my client Stephanie is a professional organizer. Representing her existing clients, she carries herself with confidence. But when trying to sell herself to new clients, she tries to fade into the background. She doesn’t like selling or promoting herself.
“It feels very icky,” she told me.
She related herself to a diminutive, soft-spoken female character in Police Academy named Hooks. Hooks is forever apologetically trying to get people to listen to her when even she doesn’t seem sure she has anything useful to say. “Excuse me, excuse me,” she will say as the crowd keeps talking.
Stephanie’s fear-based thoughts tell her she’s bothering people, and she predicts they won’t want what she has to offer. To counter that attitude, we’re working on changing her thoughts to, “I have something they need! Sharing the value I bring to the table serves them. I would be remiss not to.” These thoughts will bring more confidence.
Another way to control thoughts is by thinking differently about failure. What if instead of win or lose situations, you defined outcomes as winning or learning? Suddenly, there’s no such thing as failure. There’s just learning.
In a coaching situation, clients often start out telling me all the details of what is going on and all their history. But I am notorious for cutting them short and asking, “so what’s the problem?” This is a showstopper. They often cannot answer that question.
In the end, the real problem is almost invariably the fact that they don’t want to feel a negative feeling. Often, a negative feeling is the worst thing they can experience.
Good news! We can change that experience — keep reading.
Uncertainty is a real and constant fear. Uncertainty and ambiguity are inherent in entrepreneurship. They never leave. You’ll always have the unknown... and even unknowns about the unknown!
Recognizing you’ll never have all the information is important. The Blank Spot of Impending Catastrophe doesn’t have to hold Impending Catastrophe. That’s your cavewoman brain that loves catastrophizing.
Instead, why not project Impending Awesomeness? Why not look forward to the unknown? Wouldn’t it be boring to always know everything that is going to happen? None of the gifts you get on birthdays or holidays would be a surprise. You would know everything everyone was going to do, always.
At a retreat I just led, I didn’t tell the attendees what we were doing next until we got to that point. They loved it. Sometimes it’s so much more fun to just go with the flow and not control everything.
For entrepreneurs who constantly battle the fear of failure, mentors, coaches, and support networks can be vital sources of reassurance because they can support the other three strategies.
According to Harvard Business Review researchers James Hayton and Gabriella Cacciotti, beginners and seasoned entrepreneurs benefit from a community of peers who are in any stage of business growth and of life. “These communities provide formal or informal access to those with more experience,” the researchers wrote. “By belonging to a community, they learn that feelings of uncertainty and worry are commonplace, as well as which issues are deserving of attention and which will fix themselves over time.”[1] This is the number-one reason why a lot of the coaching I offer takes place within a coaching community.
According to Hayton and Cacciotti, “Fear of failure is widespread and has both negative and positive effects on motivation, decision-making, and behavior.” Fear, while motivating, can also create more stress, leading to health ramifications and unsustainable progress. We’ll examine this more in upcoming chapters. The important thing to note is that fear is normal in entrepreneurship, and business owners must accept that and know how to handle it.
That ability can only come from changing the underlying things that are creating your fear — your thoughts, especially your beliefs.
[1] James Hayton and Gabriella Cacciotti, “How Fear Helps (and Hurts) Entrepreneurs,” Harvard Business Review, April 03, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/04/
Andrea Liebross is a small business owner, certified business and life coach, popular keynote, and author behind the #1 Amazon bestseller, She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide To Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary, a primer for any woman in business who feels struck and frustrated and is looking to create a plan, a new mindset, and improved systems that support all their priorities. More information on Andrea can be found at www.AndreaLiebross.com.
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