Thursday, September 19, 2013

Fear of Failure, I'm doing it again!

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” Paulo Coelho, The AlchemistI have a confession to make the last two weeks I’ve been procrastinating.  The major culprit is I have this underlying fear of failure.  The other culprit is my unrealistic expectations of success.  Lastly I said Yes to many unimportant events.  Now I’m faced with delaying a project that I want to share with my tribe to help them.   It’s not a comfortable feeling.  So here are some of my thoughts that I have learned the hard way and hopefully this time I learned a valuable lesson.
1.  Be Aware – I was listening to this awesome Tele-summit called "Superwomen Syndrome,Take off the Cape and find your true power" hosted by Michelle Weimer and one of the speakers was talking about fears and that a symptom of it was procrastination. This project I'm working on kept on being pushed to the next day, this should have been my clue that I was procrastinating.  The funny thing is I knew it as soon as it popped up on the call.  The bottom line was I was procrastinating because I  was afraid!  So that awareness is that uncomfortable feeling that you have that pushes you one way or another.  Either you are going to ignore it or work on it.  The cool thing is when I became aware of it, I actually wrote my coach and saids let's work on it.
2.  Find out the why – I knew there was a reason for my procrastination but I didn't want face it.  For me this time it was the fear of failure.  It was rearing it's ugly head.  So I tried to ignore it and do other things that didn't really matter. The bottom line is I was working on this project and I was afraid to put out there because I was afraid it wouldn't be good enough. That it would be a failure.
  3.  Tackle it -So I talked it through with my coach and I came to the conclusion if I didn't put my project out there  I was failing!  Also I came to the conclusion that not putting it out there would cause regret in me.
I know now that every once in a while fear is going to creep into my life and try to prevent me from realizing my dreams. My coach has often told me to feel the fear and do it anyway.  So that is what I'm going to do.  Stay tuned for some announcements coming from me in the next few weeks and a really cool training series.  In the meantime think about these questions.  Is fear causing you to put off that needs to be done?  Is there an underlying reason you are procrastinating? Drop me a line and tell me some things you do to crush fear!  Don't let fear crush your dreams!