There are, of course a whole load of reasons when it comes to selling our products and services that the fear of failure can make an appearance.
A few years ago, I sat with a group of small business owners and we were talking about things that would stop you taking action. One lovely person said it was without question the fear of failure that stopped him doing certain things and he battled to overcome it.
Of course, once the admission was made others agreed and as another person said ‘I actually feel a bit of a failure admitting that is a problem for me too’.
Whilst I am not qualified to give the scientific reasons behind why we feel like that I absolutely know it creeps in with most of us at some point. The fear of no one liking what we have, the fear of being ignored, the fear of getting that negative feedback are all real. The typing the post on LinkedIn and then deleting it!
There is of course another way of looking at this all together which is as the famous saying goes ‘It is better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all’.
I know certainly I follow that rule (most of the time) now and I’ve got a catalogue of learning curves to prove it.
The big positive for my clients is that they definitely benefit from my numerous learning curves that I’ve had along the way.
If you are sitting there now reading this thinking about a new product, service, post, blog that you want to share but feeling anxious that it may not work or no one will like it and therefore you considered it to be a failure then think again because things only really take shape when we put it out there and we get feedback, good, bad or indifferent.
Like many others I’ve gained so much more from my ‘learning curves’ than from my successes.
One example springs to mind – my 10 minutes 10 Days 10 Actions online programme had many tweaks to it after my beta launch – all for the better. No failures there because I got feedback from the people who would benefit from the programme and recently I have enhanced it further.
So what is the worst that can happen if you put it out there – you learn a whole heap of stuff from it which makes you equipped to take action.
What is the alternative if you don’t do it – you regret not doing it and you will never know whether it was your best idea or your worst.
Finally, there is one sure way of squashing the fear of failure and that is replacing it with some great processes, steps and actions, and committing to other people that you are going to do them. So it goes from I could do that today to its on my actions/processes today and it’s part of my customer service and I’ve committed to other people too and it’s happening.
When the thing you are fearing is all part of a process, whether that’s your follow up process, customer service experience then the fear of not doing it and letting people down is greater in my view.
When I work with my clients 1:1 we get to the root of what is holding them back, what processes they are missing and we create a set of actions to work to and yes I’m their challenger and cheerleader and we make stuff happen.
It all starts with a FREE exploratory call
