What Could You Accomplish If You Let Go Of Fear And Worry

What Could You Accomplish If you Let Go Of Worry And Fear

I was thinking about that this morning. Is fear and worry holding me back from accomplishing my professional goals?

To some extent, it holds us all back from accomplishing professional goals…for some of us, more than others, and sometimes more than other times. During a recession, many of us are concerned about money and the future. During a time of family instability many of us hold tight to what we know. All of these are understandable.

However, are there things that you are worried about that prevent you from accomplishing your professional goals? Things such as failure, not having support of family and friends, alienating yourself from the people you care about if you do something they don’t support or even how they will feel if you accomplish your professional goals and move ahead of them professionally or financially. Actually, the list of fears and worries can literally go on and on.

Some fears and worries are good. It’s important to develop a self-protective mechanism. Fear that keeps you and those you care about from harms way is a good one. Worry that is realistic and pro-active will keep you in balance and moving forward to do something about the thing you are concerned about.

The other kind of worry is based on perceptions that might not have a basis in reality. In other words, something that you think is real but it is not based in fact. Sometimes, when we fear the unknown, our mind makes something up to fill in the void. That’s the kind of fear that might not be based in reality. That’s the “What if, “ kind of fear. That’s the kind of fear that prevents us from going for our professional goals and moving forward with or life!

So imagine for a moment what professional goals you could accomplish if you didn’t have to worry about any of the things that you worry about. Imagine for a moment, what you could accomplish if you had no fear.

When I first graduated from college, I followed the traditional route of accomplishing my professional goals by finding a job in my related field (international business) in NYC. I worked for a number of years in a traditional business setting. The entire time, I knew that in order to continue on the professional goal path I set out for myself, I would need to take a different path. I needed to own my own business…to be the boss, to try something that nobody in my family had ever done before. Was I scared? You bet I was. I was scared about using my entire life’s savings on the next professional goal, I was scared that my family wouldn’t think I was doing the right thing, and I was scared that I would move ahead of my friends. The only thing I wasn’t scared of was failure. For me, I knew that failure wasn’t an option, because for me, failure wasn’t not getting the result I hoped for, for me, failure meant quitting. And there was no way I was going to quit.

Recognize your fears. Decide what is real and what is perception. Calculate the probability of achieving your professional goals versus the possibility of not achieving them. And when you know that failure is not an option, you have conquered the fear!