How the Fear of Making Mistakes Holds You Back Financially
I’ve been thinking about mistakes lately.
Not just the ordinary kind; the typo in an email, the investment that doesn’t work out, the business idea that flops.
I mean the deeper kind of fear that can live in the body when you grew up believing that making a mistake could cost you something.
For some of us, mistakes were met with criticism in the form of shouting, humiliation, verbal attackphysical punishment.
And when you grow up in an environment like that mistakes are dangerous.
Being wrong is dangerous.
Being seen getting something wrong is dangerous.
Admitting that you made a mistake is dangerous.
And you become incredibly good at trying not to make mistakes.
You might become a perfectionist and invisible. You learn to over-prepare, overthink and over-analyse.
You wait until you know exactly what you're doing before you take the first step.
And you find yourself desperately wanting to get things right before anyone can see you trying.
How perfectionism impacts your finances
What does being afraid of making a mistake have to do with your bank account?
Quite a lot, actually.
Because building wealth requires us to experiment which feels threatening when we’ve learned that mistakes are unsafe.
The process of building wealth requires us to try or invest in new things, to make decisions without having absolute certainty.
If we want to succeed as entrepreneurs or in our careers we have to put ourselves out there and we have to be willing to learn and get things wrong.
Think about entrepreneurship.
You don't start a business knowing exactly what will work.
You try an offer.
You discover that people don't want it in the form you created it.
You change it.
You try again.
You put something out publicly and realise it doesn't resonate.
You learn.
You make an investment that doesn't perform the way you hoped.
You reassess.
You collaborate with someone and discover that the relationship isn't right.
You learn.
You make mistakes.
And you keep going.
But if your nervous system has learned that being wrong means being attacked, humiliated, rejected or punished, this process can feel unsafe.
You don't experience experimentation as experimentation, you experience it as exposure and danger and suddenly, doing nothing feels safer than doing something imperfectly.
The problem is that perfection is an impossible entry requirement for growth.
And so the very thing that was designed to protect you from the pain of making mistakes becomes the thing that prevents you from experiencing the opportunities that require you to take imperfect action.
You don't start the business.
You don't make the investment.
You don't ask for the opportunity.
You don't collaborate.
You don't put yourself on the platform.
You don't tell people what you know.
You wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Until you're ready.
Except sometimes, ready never comes.
What if mistakes became evidence that you were learning?
I think one of the most powerful shifts we can make is to stop asking ourselves to become people who never make mistakes and rather focus on becoming people who know how to recover from mistakes.
People who can say:
I got that wrong.
I don't know yet.
I am still learning.
And I'm still safe.
Financial growth doesn't require us to eliminate the possibility of failure.
Financial growth requires us to build the capacity to survive imperfection, to experiment without needing guarantees, to be visible without needing to be flawless, to make decisions without knowing exactly how everything will turn out and to discover that getting something wrong doesn't mean that we are wrong.
Financial growth requires us to understand that making a mistake doesn't make us a failure, that being imperfect doesn't make us unworthy and that being seen while we learn doesn't have to mean being punished.
Because the financial opportunity isn't waiting for us on the other side of knowing exactly what to do; it's waiting for us on the other side of being willing to try and trusting ourselves to handle whatever happens next.
