How To Stop Procrastinating Your Career Goal With Fear

What happens if you show a photo of a yellow flower to a 6-month-old baby? Nothing in particular.

And if you show her the same size, the same yellow image of a spider? Her pupil gets large. She will be frightened. Even if she had never seen spiders before.

Scientists say that you are born with 3 fears: loud noises, being dropped down, and scuttle-y animals. What about the fear of failure? You learn later on. Consequently, you can overcome it.

Lately, I have spent most of my time cleaning the coffee machine, separating cheese from the vegetables in the fridge, and so on. Am I obsessed with tidiness? Not at all. I had to start (or at least I should have started) working on my business.

How About You?

Maybe you are scrolling your feed while you should be applying for jobs. Or organizing your already organized email box instead of following up on a course for your future career.

No matter how different our goals are, we surely have 1 thing in common. Fear of possible failure. Finding excuses for not starting feels safer than starting and probably not succeeding.

Fail To Succeed

There was a young boy who was always bullied at school because he was too small. For that reason, he didn’t have many friends. He spent most of his days alone, reading.

His parents wanted him to be a lawyer, so he started Harvard. But he was way more interested in coding. Being dropped out of law school, he set up his company.

Even though he worked hard, he struggled a huge deal financially. Many of his clients went bankrupt. Failure followed failure. Then the company had its first big product launch. The product was called Windows, and the young man was Bill Gates.

Bill Gates was so sure of his product that he estimated that 90% of computer users would use Windows. But it turned out to be a failure. It was only 10% of computers where the program was installed.

So he continued to work even harder. Microsoft added Word and Excel to its features and released Windows 2. In a short while, just as he predicted, 90% of computer users switched to Windows.

Bill Gates became a billionaire at the age of 31. Later he became the richest man in the world.

Doubt To Thrive

A healthy amount of fear, and being uncertain about your success pushes you forward. In the university, you have reviewed the material before your exam because you were scared of failing. As a result, you didn’t fail.

You didn’t feel that you excel so much in a foreign language, so you took language courses. Thanks to that, you are fluent now. In the process of doubting your skills, you are constantly learning and improving yourself.

Mark Manson wrote brilliantly that dissatisfaction and insecurity will push you to change and learn. “Pain and misery are not bugs of human evolution; they’re features. People who become great at something understand that they are not already great. They are average. But they are willing to improve themselves.”

Feel the fear but do it anyway

Finally, I sat down and finished my website. Did my fear go away? No. Was I convinced that people would like it? Far from it.

I felt the fear but did it anyway. This is the only way to improve: try your best, admit if you fail, and do it again. Better.

So what is it that you are postponing? Applying for a job? Asking for a better position? Sometimes you don’t feel ready, even if you are indeed ready. So you just must give it a try anyway. Or maybe you need some more skills to succeed. But the only way to find out is to put yourself out there. Because only then you can have feedback on what to improve.

Think about Bill Gates. Windows 1 was a complete failure. So they upgraded it and created a world-famous product. He had years of failure before succeeding. So don’t get discouraged on the way; it’s part of the game. As he did, look back on all your experience, and understand where you can improve.

What about the baby?

The baby will not give up on walking even after getting up and falling down 1000 times. Even if it hurts. She will not decide to stay with breastfeeding because she messes up everything when she cannot find her mouth with a spoon. Even if she looks ridiculous.

You are born to be way more resilient than you imagine. And you still are. The only difference is that now we care too much. “What if they think..., what will they say…?”

This is something we all picked up on the way. But it’s not inherent. So you might as well transform it to your advantage.

But How?

We have a tendency to compare ourselves to the best of the best in every domain. We tend to see only those who succeed on social media, so we set an expectation that we should succeed each and every time and fast.

But this is an unrealistic and dangerous mindset. No one will post on LinkedIn that they have applied to 100 posts and failed. You will only see that now they are promoted. No one will post on Instagram when they are overeating miserably at home after another failure in their business. You will only see them celebrating their success at a fancy beach bar.

Yet we all pass through all those phases. Think about refusal as an inevitable part of the process. Failure is not when you don’t succeed; it’s when you don’t even try. So even if you don’t feel ready, give your best shot. Try. And if it didn’t work out, just do it again.

All you need is persistence. And it’s only a decision. Marisa Peer says that self-belief without talent can take you further than talent without self-belief. But when you have both, you are unstoppable.

If you can overcome your challenges from your own strength, it's the best for your personal growth. However, sometimes things can get so overwhelming that it's good to have a support. If you need a one-on-one coaching call to help with your career challenges, you can find me at www.mindfinitely.com.

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