Do you recognise the following?
You keep postponing something you actually crave?
Something you want to go for 100% and which makes your heart skip a beat?
But you’re holding back?
It gnaws at you. You want to do it.
But a tiny voice in your head keeps yelling: ‘Don’t do it! You might fail!’.
That voice is Fear. Fear for rejection. The fear that it isn’t good enough. That the thing you want won’t gain you enough. Fear that no one will take you seriously. Fear for what others will say.
Fear for… well, fill in the blank in your own words.
Two words that sum all this up: performance anxiety. The fear to fall short. To not be able to live up to the expectations of yourself and others. This makes you take strategic steps. Makes you act conventional. To the degree where you cannot take the steps your heart wants you take. And your heart is bummed out because of it and you don’t progress an inch.
Recognisable?
That’s why you need to learn to fail. Successful people know; you need to fail to improve. It makes you stronger, more tactical and more focused on your target.
Here’s five reasons why. To stimulate you to live a life of unlimited failing.
“If you are going to fail, that’s ok, just fail forward.”
Lisa Nichols
And become (even more) successful because of it:
1. You overcome your fear
By doing something more often, you train your brain to not know fear. You turn the unknown into a habit. Fear will not be an obstacle any longer. And if something doesn’t go as planned, it’s a learning process instead of a failure.
2. It makes you wiser
Every time I fail, it’s because I’m doing something I’ve never done before. So I know that failing equals learning something new. And if one thing in life makes me happy, it’s obtaining a new skill! In the process of learning, failing helps. You build a knowledge base; what works and what definitely doesn’t?
3. It stimulates courage
It takes courage to tackle things in a different manner than you were used to go about it. To go out of your comfort zone. The more often you step out of that zone, the easier it gets. You’ll become more dynamical, look for possibilities instead of restrictions. So that if you fall, you’ll think of the lessons it teaches you, instead of feeling smaller because of it.
4. You build perseverance
If we need one characteristic to get somewhere, it’s perseverance. The moment things aren’t on a roll, perseverance prevents you from giving up. You mark time and analyse what is needed to make the situation or relation work. And that’s how failing works: you stop for a minute to look around. What’s going on and what tools can you use to make it work.
5. It creates new possibilities
If you’ll always keep walking the same route and keep doing the same things over and over, you’ll never discover something new. Failing opens doors that were unopened before. And probably it’s exactly the door that you needed to become successful!
My tip for you: be great at failing and you’ll enjoy taking actions in the direction you want to go!
Do you feel like you need more tips about and insights into your blockage performance anxiety?
Get in touch with me : sayhi@hannalou.com