5 ways to transform your fears into motivations for succeeding in your business
Fear occurs in any area of our careers especially when we seek to develop our careers, grow our businesses and collaborate with others for the first time. I have recently watched this TED talk, ‘Three questions to unlock your authentic career’ by Ashley Stahl, about three crucial questions to ask oneself that allows you to unlock your maximum career potential, thus allowing you to achieve your goals. These questions include:
What are your strengths?
What do people tell you are good at?
What are some of the things that hinder you or hold you back from achieving your goals?
In this blog post, I would like to focus on the ways in which we can leverage our fears, as this is a crucial aspect of the process of becoming successful. Lee, (2019) states in her book, ‘A Surge of Possibilities’ that there are so many ways that we experience fear in our minds. Some of these include failure, disappointment, rejection, loss, and self-criticism.
In saying this, I realized that failure is not something that we should fear; we have the potential to transform our fears into motivations. Personally, I have a fear of disappointment, losing independence and not being able to support or help those close to me. Through much self-reflection, I managed to transforms my fears into something that motivated me to run my business, and it pushed me into not giving up on myself. (Lee, 2019).
The first step to overcoming our fears, is to reflect on how they make us feel. This it should be a critical self-reflection. There are many tools out there that can help us identify and come up with effective strategies to deal with them. This is a summary of my own journey that I have been using in the last two years. You can just close your eyes and ask yourself the following questions and you can write down the answers on a piece of paper (Larter, 2016).
Identify your fear triggers. What are your fear triggers? What is stopping you from achieving your goals?
Identify your feelings. How are these fears making you feel? How are these fears affecting your body?
Identify the evidences of your fears. What are the memories, images or situations that come to your mind?
Evaluate your fears. What are the facts that support your fears? What are the facts against your fears? How truthful are those fears when you compare them with the reality? What have others said about your fears? Is it possible that your fear is an opinion rather than a fact? Is your reaction to this goal or plan causing you to fear more strongly in proportion to the actual situation?
Make a plan for a more realistic and balanced perspective to overcome your fears. What is the big picture? What would be the worst outcome if I were to take action? What would be the most likely outcome If I were to take action?
These five topics can help you to identify and come with strategies to tackle your fears. You can choose to feed your fear or use it to fuel your positive mindset. For example, reading could be a habit and strategy that could help many to build confidence as a business owner, entrepreneur or consultant. Learning to act in spite of your fear is an important part of your path to success (Larter, 2016).
Feel free to leave me your experience in the comments of how this tool of five questions helps you to successfully overcome your fears.
Works Cited
Larter, L. (2016). Pilot to profit : Navigating modern entrepreneurship to build your business using online marketing, social media, content marketing and sales. New york : Morgan James.
Lee, M. (2019). A surge of possibilities. Ontario: Black card books.
Stahl, A. (Director). (2014). Three Questions to unlock your authentic career [Motion Picture].
