The Zer0% Blog - Part 3 - Fear

What is the opposite of fear? For that is surely what we are seeking to attain in order to overcome fear. Or is fear something for us to harness and add to our arsenal of entrepreneurial superpowers as we build our empire?

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear." Mark Twain

Fear in entrepreneurship. Perceived threats, risks, or uncertainties associated with starting, running, or growing a business. It encompasses a range of anxieties, doubts, and insecurities that entrepreneurs may encounter throughout their entrepreneurial journey, potentially hindering decision-making, innovation, and growth. Like many emotional abstracts, there are physical elements too. Nausea, muscle strain, raised blood pressure. All designed by the body to draw us away from fear-inducing situations. In essence, the emotional can halt the physical.

Clearly, this is not the ideal situation to find yourself in as a business owner. The importance of mastering this set of reactions could be a crucial difference in whether or not you succeed, or even start, in the world of business. Let's get in there and have a look at typical fears for the entrepreneur, and by the end of this post, find some actionable strategies for overcoming and even embracing fear.

Me

Who am I to think I can run a business? Yes, me. Kevin Wrenn. Owner of multiple franchises. Profitable businesses. Right now, as I write this, I wonder who the hell will give up their time to read it. I mean, if that's you, let me start with a bloody big thank you. Let me know in the comments below. I will be eternally grateful and will reply to any and all comments. Heck, why not hit the subscribe button if you've gotten this far? Yet it was fear that stopped me from taking the leap for years. Indeed, it was fear that pushed me, a thoroughly round (rotund?) peg into the utterly and unyieldingly square hole of teaching for a decade and a half. I knew I had the skills and the personality to do something far more creative and less limiting, yet I sat dutifully on the upper pay scale and traipsed through those terms like a good university graduate with a middle-class job title. Here's my take on four key areas that held me in a fear response for too long.

Fear of Failure

The first stop on this tour of trepidation is one where the budding business can be derailed before even starting the journey. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), over half of all respondents in some economies cited fear of failure as the key reason not to pursue a potential business (1). What is it that we fear? Could it be the way others will react to even having the idea? Is it the thought of being laughed at for messing it up? The idea of having to go back to our old job, or worse, not having one, could paralyse us. Or is it a financial fear of causing ruin in the household? Evolution has taught us to stay in our lane and keep away from what causes us fear. The thrill of watching a horror movie—that's the brain associating the jump-scare with turning the corner of a rock face and coming eyeball-to-eyeball with a sabre-toothed tiger. The fear of looking the fool in front of your peers—that'll be the human psyche. We will explore how we overcome that later in the post. (Quote the pit pony on the post.)

Fear of rejection

When do we learn to give so much of a damn about how others see us? Throughout our early childhood stages (birth to 12 months, 12-36 months, 36-60 months, and 72 months+), we experience rejection more as a denial of acceptance than anything else. The lack of warmth from a care-giver, a parental 'no', the social rejection of being left out of a team at school. They all teach us that not being part of something is bad and should be avoided. We don't like the feeling. Look at the fear responses mentioned in the earlier part of this post. Now take yourself back to a time when you were rejected for something at a young age. Take the time to sit and visualise that moment. If you give it a few minutes, those feelings will begin to manifest in you now, many years later. They are hardwired there as a reminder to avoid rejection. No slide that lens over the idea of giving up your teaching career, buying a franchise, and relying on it as your present and future. That's quite a leap, and one that we develop strategies to achieve. Strategies that we will cover before this article ends.

Fear of Financial Insecurity

What is your absolute bottom line? There is a marvellous video produced by Sharon Cawley from Conexus Tuition Franchising entitled 'The Pit Pony'. First of all, if you're in any way thinking of leaving your current profession to strike out as a business owner, I implore you to watch this video. Within it is the absolute nugget of working out your bottom line. Whether, like me, you have a spreadsheet of your household budget or write it on the back of an envelope once every 5 years, you will know what you must bring in to meet your basic financial obligations. But what the aforementioned video does is reframe this out of an annual salary into a daily figure. I, for one, was amazed at what I needed to earn in a day in order to meet my monthly bills. We all have different levels of financial necessity.

Fear of Uncertainty

The most basic of all fears. What we don't know scares us. There are no guarantees in life, save for the obvious ending, and that either scares the heck out of us or we learn to accept the feeling and use it to motivate us. There are many memes and posts out there about treating each day like our last, so I won't dive into that particular mindset. What I will say is this: From all the many hours of podcasts listened to, articles consumed, and conversations had, there seems to be a common thread: regretting what we didn't do. In an article published in The Independent (3), the overwhelming truth about elderly people was that their biggest regrets were not taking risks.

Let me put in a caveat here. We are not talking about scaling El Cap rope-free or learning to steer Great Whites away with a deft hand motion. Those risks represent something altogether different. Nor are we eschewing the virtues of reckless hedonism in excess. What we are saying here is that unless something is actually going to put us or someone else in mortal peril, what's the reason not to do it?

That's where some of you who have come across this blog may well be right now. I talk to people all the time who want to start a business when (insert X, Y, and Z here)...

So, how do we overcome our inertia and become risk-takers who won't regret what we were afraid of doing? How do we harness that fear and use it to drive us on? What are the strategies for overcoming fear?

The Zero% Blog Part 4: Overcoming Fear. Out next week...