The Business Fear Factor
As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, my parents were working class parents. So growing up, I was cultured in the typical mindset of go to school, get a good job, and save my money. The mindset was very conservative and risk adversed.
Because I was brought up in such a way, when I started to meddle in the business world, I naturally resisted a lot of things. The business mindset was totally out of my comfort zone. Fear of doing things that I wasn’t comfortable with and taking up a totally contrarian mindset than what I was used to was very challenging for me.
Risk, selling, meeting new people, being independent, etc. were some of the thing that I feared, especially being an introverted personality type (yes I’m introverted).
It’s ironic that many people who want to be entrepreneurs or want to get out of working for someone else don’t realize how dependent they are to a job, both financially and mentally. I found that out for myself when I killed my job.
Fear was the common factor that slowed me down. I had to learn to have a fearless mentality when I ventured into business and investing. It’s an internal game that only I had the power to overcome.
Yes, you can get outside support to motivate you to be fearless, but by doing that, you will only develop a dependance on that outside support. So, the solution to overcoming fear is to face it.
“The things that you fear the most doing, is usually the very thing that you need to do…”
That’s what I did. It took me a while, but whenever I came across the negative self talk or wanted to avoid doing something, I pushed myself to do it. I understood that it was fear that kept me from doing the very things that I needed to do. So when I felt that familiar feeling, I forced myself to just do it.
One of my things was that I was a perfectionist. Having that mentality of it needs to be/feel perfect before I could do something really slowed my progress down in the beginning of my entrepreneur ventures. My fear of things not being perfect kept me overanalyzing (analysis paralysis) which led to a whole lot of procrastinating. The fundamental problem there was fear.
For most people fear will keep them from doing the very things that they want to do, whether if it’s business or personal. Coming across it is inevitable. And until one can conquer those fears, success will not come.