What Were Your Fears and How Did You Deal With Them

0:00 [Music] for me the biggest life fear that has dominated or that had dominated my 20s and my 30s was just fear of failure and fear of being judged negatively for my work not being judged negatively socially that I was always okay with I welcomed it but the fear of being judged for my work in a negative way the fear of getting negative feedback was there I

0:32 did not realize it then but looking back now that combination of the fear of failure and the fear of being judged negatively at least partly existed because of two things one I really wanted to be great at my craft and I can give zero credit to myself for that feeling I I think I was just wired that way I didn't decide one day and worked hard to be in that place so that was one which is I just wanted to be great at my

0:58 craft and the second thing was I had attached my identity to my craft whenever you attach your identity to something the fear start the defensiveness starts because we want to protect our identity so that was definitely there for me in that time now the interesting thing is I never had the fear of failure over the long term for me the fear of failure manifested over the short term like when I was about to take on a new thing and it was even at

1:23 the level of like oh I'm going to run an important meeting next week and I had this fear oh it's not going to go well and sometimes I would wouldn't be able to sleep or oh I I'm going to have this kind of tough conversation tomorrow with somebody and so now that is creating some fear in me it wasn't like fear of failure as in like I am going to be a failure I never felt that I always felt

1:44 like I'll figure things out and I will do fine I cannot explain why really I haven't fully understood this but I'm just expressing truly how I felt it was more that kind of fear of failure in the micro not fear of failure in the macro people characterize some of what I said as kind of chip on the shoulder syndrome like people who do end up well as they end up having these attributes because of these feelings they go the extra mile

2:12 maybe there is some truth to that and there are people who don't have these feelings they also do extremely well but perhaps the difference is that people who have these feelings and they Channel it in a positive way which is a very big precondition but if they do that they perhaps do better than their natural potential whereas there might be others who don't have these feelings that do extremely well but it's not clear that they're doing better than their natural

2:36 potential because maybe their natural potential to begin with is high so sometimes these fears do end up uh being net positive so so those are couple of examples of fears I had other than that uh I guess I'll mention along with this another thing I'm a big believer in noticing your fears and in some cases accepting those fears and taking action to mitigate those fears or to mitigate the consequences [Music]