Dealing With Fear Of Failure In My First Month Of Business
I want to tell you a story from my first month of running my creative coaching business. I want to tell it because I know that the fear of failure holds many of us back in our creative lives. It held me back when I started writing my first novel, and I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t dealt with that fear.
In my first month of business, I had another round with that fear, in its new shiny shape: the fear of failing as a creative business owner.
Oh hello again fear
It was a Tuesday evening in February, my least favourite day of the week in my least favourite month. I sat on the sofa and felt my pulse speeding up. One month had passed since I had launched my creative coaching business. I’d booked one client so far and logically I thought I was doing just fine. A slow start was expected and I had booked a client after all. But another part of my brain was screaming
I’m failing I’m failing I’m failing!
I had had two colds and been very tired the past weeks, and overwhelmed by everything I wanted to do to get my business going. The day before I had sent out a Teacup Owl Letter I knew wasn’t very well written and more people than usual had unsubscribed. And hours earlier I had posted a picture on Instagram that wasn’t doing well in terms of likes, just like most hadn’t the past few weeks.
The voice chanted in my mind. Failing failing failing.
As I sat there on my sofa, my heart beating, it all suddenly felt familiar. Why did I feel like I was failing, even if my logical mind said that it was fine? Well, because I was terrified of failing and I was looking for proof that it was happening.
Just like I had used to.
My history with fear
In 2016, I set out to face my creative fears in my Fear Year. I did it because my fears were keeping me from doing the creative work I longed for, and the biggest fear of them all? Of failing as a writer. Of never getting good enough to have a novel published. I was terrified because I wanted so badly to be a writer and I didn’t really believe I could write as well as I thought I had to.
Back then, my main problem was that I didn’t face my fears. I was frozen, blocked and felt my dream slipping away. I began my Fear Year in response to that, when I finally realised that there were no way around fear, only into it.
That particular lesson had stayed with me, and I’d taken it with me into my journey of starting a business. The problem wasn’t that I tried to avoid fear, it was that I wasn’t applying any of the other lessons I had learned about how to manage it.
Sitting there on the sofa with my phone in my hand, I clicked up the blog post I’d written at the end of my Fear Year. I read trough the lessons and yes, I was going through all of it again with this new shape of my old fear.
One lesson stood out to me:
The process is more important than the result.
Dealing with fear by leaning into the process
In my creative work, I have learned that focusing too much on the result never feels good. It makes you anxious and perfectionistic, forgetting to tap into the joy of creating. Which is what it’s all about, after all.
As I read that lesson, I knew I was failing to lean into the process of building a business. I had a vision of the kind of life I wanted to live - coaching and creating within a slower life. I had finally begun my journey of getting there and I saw this as the moment of truth. Would I manage it, or would my dream of a slower creative life be just that, a childish dream? I was terrified of the answer and just as I had doubted my abilities as a writer, I secretly didn’t fully believe I could make it as a business owner.
I saw the process of building my business as a necessary evil. The tough, nerve-wrecking period before my hard work would pay off and I’d have a sustainable business. The result was what I cared about, the process was just something I had to endure.
Clearly this needed to change.
One of the problems, I think, stems from the fact that I’m used to purely creative work where bad results may be disappointing, but it’s no worse than that. In business, bad results can mean that you can’t pay your bills. There’s a difference there, of course it is. We can’t completely ignore the results.
But that doesn’t mean we have to disregard the process. We can still apply the mindset of leaning into the joy of the process rather than obsessing about the results. And in my case, while lacking results would push the day I could make my business a big part of my income, I still have an income from my day job to pay the bills.
The day after my bout of anxiety on the sofa, I sat down and wrote everything I could think of that I could cherish in the process of building my business. Here’s what I wrote:
Learning so much - I love to learn!
The openness and the sense of possibility in the beginning.
Learning from working with my first clients and seeing them make ideas happen.
Being able to experiment and use trial and error, as I’m not yet financially dependent on it.
Oh the joy of creating digital products.
Getting to spend a lot of time on creating content, which I love.
Building and honing the foundation of my coaching practice.
The thrill of building something this big and hopefully life-changing.
Being of service to my fantastic, kind-hearted friends and followers.
Looking over the list made me feel a little lighter already. I knew I was on the right track, and that going deeper into the joy of the process would help me manage that fear.
How I’m moving forward
In the weeks after I started to shift my mindset to the joy of the process, my fear slowly released its grip. I let go of my firm idea on exactly where I wanted to be when, and instead started to cherish the beauty of this part of the process.
I felt stressed and overwhelmed in my first month, because I wanted everything to happen so fast. I thought I should make it happen as fast as possible. But I wasn’t happy creating that way.
To rush through the process of building a business isn’t the way I want to create it.
It’s not aligned with the slow living way I’ve chosen.
Neither is it aligned with the word I’ve chosen for 2020: wholehearted.
So I decided to slow everything down. I dedicated a week to destress, took time off social media and creative work, did yoga and went on a long forest walk. I chose to postpone the launch of a workbook for planning your creative work in tune with the season until the end of 2020. It all helped.
Now I’m going gentler, and I’m defining what I want my joyful process to be. My own slow living way of building a creative business.
So I’ll leave you with this for now. If you ever feel trapped by the fear of failure, try leaning into the joy of the process. It might just change your whole experience.
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