Not too long ago, I decided to learn something new. This isn’t really a big deal because I learn something new everyday, but it made me feel very nervous.
[ad#Adsense]As many of you know, I have a website about massage. It’s a content site that I built through a company called Site Build It! While I think the company is good and provides me with a lot of the tools needed to build a good content website that gets traffic, I don’t like the look of their websites. So I decided to try to redesign the look of my site. This required me to make a purchase that wasn’t a particularly big purchase, but made me nervous for one main reason. What if it’s too hard and I can’t do it? What if I just wasted money on something I’ll never use because it’s too hard?

That was a few weeks ago. Everything went well and I was able to change the look of my site, but my experience made me think about trying new things and what holds me and I assume other people back.

Fear of Failure

I think that most of the time the problem is fear of failure. Like everyone, I have that little voice in my head that sometimes says, What if you can’t? The secret to success is silencing that negative voice and moving forward with you plan.

Failure plays a necessary role in finding success. Every successful business person has a few failed business ventures in their past. If they gave up or never took any risks in the first place, how could they have possibly found success? If your fear of failure causes you to miss opportunities, how will you ever find success?[ad#Adsense-1]

Overcoming the Fear of Failure

There are a few things that you can do to overcome this fear.

Weigh the pros and cons of taking action. What is the cost of not taking the opportunity? What is the benefit of taking it? If you don’t fail, what will you gain?

What’s the worst that could happen? Imagine the worst thing that could happen if you do failure and plan what you’ll do to deal with it. What lessons could you learn from the experience?

Everyone fails sometimes. It’s important to keep this in prospective. Don’t take failure too personally. I’m not telling you to move forward assuming you’ll fail. Move forward with a positive attitude. Know that if you do fail, it’s not really that bad. It doesn’t reflect badly on you personally or make you any less valuable as a human being.

Talk about your feelings with a trusted friend or family member. Talking about it can help put your fears into prospective.

Photo by Powderruns