Does the thought of failure paralyse your motivation and drive to pursue your passion? Maybe so much so that you don’t even want to begin down the road towards your goal or dream? This is a common perception among freelancers and entrepreneurs. Is it the hard work your afraid of, or the looming fear of failing? Investing so much time and effort, even financially, for something to not work out the way you envisioned at the beginning, can be heartbreaking and a setback. But perhaps not.
The worst thing you can do is to never even try at all.
The challenge is to identify, objectively, what scenarios can occur when you fail. It’s not the idea of failing that scares people, but the result of the failure. It’s important to analyse what the results of the failure may be and what failure could possibly exist, and what you could do to prepare for those risks if such a failure would ever occur.
Identify and list what the potential pitfalls may be along the way to your goal, and put yourself in a scenario where you come out on the other end of the failure, this will allow you to visualise yourself after the worst case scenario to prevent the failure from becoming a dead-end and completely discouraging you on your path to pursuing your goal.
The more you plan in advance and identify what (obvious) failures may arise if something goes wrong, and what they mean to you, the easier it will be to overcome these intermediate failures.
The key to continuing on your path to your goal is controlling how you react to the result of a failure.
Success will ultimately bring intermediate failure on its path. Certain aspects of the path may be out of your control and may bring about failure, which can be scary when so much is on the line, depending on how much you’ve risked. But it’s your response to failing which will set you on the right course to success again.
Success and failure, is an attitude.
Failures are a golden opportunity to better yourself and your process. From something going wrong, you gain the knowledge and experience to carry forward with you, which can also apply to many aspects of your creative output and artistic expressions in the future.
You get to continue on the path knowing something you didn’t before you started. Something which may be key to your process and even change your outlook on your work.
You can read about it all day, but you will never know until you actually experience it for yourself.
Go forth, put yourself at risk, it can only better you and your work in the long run.
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