How severe is failure really? At most, it is public humiliation which will greatly injure our little ego and the effects of that can last for a long long time. But the thing is that failure might be fatal but it is hardly final. It is not the end, just another beginning.
I will argue that fear is a deep unconscious human emotion that influences almost everything we do. Even greed is a form of fear when you think about it, we fear that what we have isn't enough.
Fear of failure is a very potent emotion that has gripped most people(myself included) like shackles that prevents them from actualising their potential. For me, my regrets would've been considerably less if it wasn't for this potent emotion.
In this post, I explore how strong of an influence is fear and a way to reduce its potency.
Fear Influences Almost All Our Decisions
In the mental/emotional sphere, just because something is unconscious doesn't mean that it is not there. In fact, the more unconscious it is, the more powerful it can get because there's little to no way to make sense of or control it.
We find a parallel in someone who got tipsy and is temporarily not in control of their conscious mind. They do things beyond normal yet it seems normal to them. A similar thing more or less happens with fear of failure, we lose our conscious mind, can't think straight and succumb to this potent emotion.
Whether it is the decision to travel to the other side of the globe and start a new life, shoot that shot on a potential partner or start a new business venture, fear will walk in right through that doorway like the emissary of the night and take over the atmosphere of the mind.
For me, the fact that I've experienced it numerous times doesn't seem to lessen the impact of every new one. It must be of the primal nature of fear.
Although, our environment has become relatively safer now and there isn't much natural fear, it seems the fear button on our system has become a bit dysfunctional. For one, it gets over triggered and the intensity is always high.
Can The Button Be Fixed?
Well, I feel it is a tough ask simply because the mental/emotional sphere is a web of entanglement that's really hard to decipher. What if fixing one big button would break five other small buttons?
However, this doesn't mean all hope is lost. There's an art to reducing its potency via making peace with it. I see fear as an unconscious tension between the present and the future. While we're writing the present, the future is about to be written.
To make peace with it simply means acknowledging and even welcoming fear since it is unavoidable instead of resisting it or acting like it has no influence on us. The trick however, happens after we made peace with it because there's less tension between the outcomes which would considerably reduce its influence.
So what happens if the business fails or you move to the other side of the globe and be incapable of starting a new life? Fear will trick us into seeing it as the main or only possibility.
But the thing is that it is a possibility in a myriad of possibilities. Now, does it sound really bad if it happens?
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.