As someone who has always feared judgment and held myself back from doing ‘scary’ things I’ve decided there’s not better time than becoming a new business owner to examine those fears and see which of them is really true. So in late November I began a ‘FAIL diary’.
A ‘FAIL diary’ is a notebook where I write down all the scary things I’ve tried or am afraid to try and write down all the reasons why it wasn’t so bad after all.
FAILs can include going and doing something that has always scared me but finding out the world didn’t end.
FAILs can also include the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons learned from those mistakes.
My goal is to rewire my thinking about all the ‘scary’ things I need to do to get my business going or do something in my life that needs to just get done already. For everyone their big scary things are unique.
For me, they revolve around needing to put myself out there as a business owner and get the word out about what I do.
I realize that it’s the initial hump of starting the scary thing that is the main blockage. I remind myself in my diary that every time I do this particular scary thing, I actually end up really enjoying talking at length about the thing I’m so passionate about. Once I get going and my audience is receptive I can really get into what I’m talking about.
The other category of FAIL is mistakes that you can learn from.
When I began teaching salsa for Dance Vancouver, every time I started to teach a class I was so worried about failing at the task off teaching that I couldn’t relax. I was worried that there would be too many leads and people would be frustrated or the music wouldn’t play or someone would be making someone else feel uncomfortable or my teaching was so bad it would ruin the revenue stream for my boss.
But the more times I encountered these FAILs the more confidence I got that each thing that went wrong wasn’t the end of the world. And if I didn’t know how to handle something in the moment I can be sure that my boss, who is a big supporter of my success, would ensure that I could get the advice or help I needed to get things right.
So what is the big scary thing you need to do? What are the things you fail at that you can learn from? Perhaps you can try out your own version of a FAIL diary and see if those big scary things aren’t so scary after all.