How to Overcome the Fear of Financial Failure

The brain hates uncertainty, it sees uncertainty as dangerous; the clearer you are about what you're trying to create or achieve, the more confident you'll be when it comes to taking constant action.

Uncertainty is part of life and there’s no way to know the future with complete certainty. There are too many variables.

We assume the way to avoid financial failure is to know all the variables and possibilities, but what we need isn’t knowledge of the future or instant success, what we need is courage to keep going in the face of impossible odds.

When we see our worst fears and face them, they can no longer control us.

Our fear of failure isn’t based on current reality or what will happen in the future, but what happened in the past

The mind makes decisions based on past data, which means our minds are making decisions based on past experiences.

We fear failure, not because we’re likely to fail, but because we’ve failed before and can still remember the trauma of failing.

The very first company I ever started was called Speak 2B Free and was focused on promoting storytelling and spoken word poetry.

I was living in Boston, MA; had an overdraft of US$50 when I started that company and use credit cards to run the company but I was convinced it would be successful.

I knew nothing about starting a company and scaling it to profitability and was basically living on hope and a prayer the whole three years I ran the company.

I never made any revenue in those three years because I was too scared to invoice people and would panic at the mere thought of taking money from people, so I spent a lot of time freelancing and investing all the money I made from freelancing, back into the company.

Everything I made was reinvested into the company because that's what I'd been told - that entrepreneurship is about the hustle and that it’s normal for companies not to make revenue or profits for the first few years.

I took it as gospel, I believed in the hustle and when I decided to call it quits because I was too drained and depressed to keep pushing through, I felt like a failure.

I convinced myself I was a terrible entrepreneur and told myself I should have worked harder and been more resilient.

I believed I didn’t have “what it took” to run a business because I wasn’t mentally tough and couldn’t stomach the hustle.

I entered my thirties as a wrecking ball: a failed company, $60,000 in debt, depressed, panic attacks and digestive issues.

I was a mess and some people treated me like I’d failed by society’s standards.

So you can imagine my absolute terror when I published, Heart, Mind & Money, and then made the decision to go back into entrepreneurship and start Wealthy Money.

I had panic attacks for months, I spent most of my days looking through job ads, going for job interviews and applying for freelance writing work, instead of working on my business.

I was preparing for failure and financial ruin.

When I did decide to finally do this thing, I made decisions based on my fear of failure - I was too scared to spend money on coaching, marketing or branding, which made it difficult for me to expand and scale the company, so it stagnated, which ironically, confirmed my worst fear that I’d fail as an entrepreneur.

When I started doing the inner work around my fear of failure, I realized that the only entrepreneurial version of me that my mind knew was the version of me that ran Speak 2B Free for years, was constantly stressed about money and was unable to generate revenue, so if I wanted to do this thing, I needed to change my perception of myself and give my mind a new version of me as an entrepreneur.

I developed a meditation on healing money triggers (Lesson 7 of the #MoneyMagic course) and started using that meditation to go back into my memories of running Speak 2B Free and healing all those triggers.

My focus was to heal my fear of failure by accepting and integrating those memories into my psyche so that I could heal the root of my fear of financial failure.

When I started to heal these parts of me, I was able to start seeing the new entrepreneurial version of me in this moment, which changed the way I approached Wealthy Money and gave me the confidence to start investing in resources and scaling the company.

Choose a tribe that’s changes your perception of failure

Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed, I just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

When we change the way we see failure, we change the way we view success which empowers us to keep taking action until we get the result we want.

One of the most important things I did when I started Wealthy Money, was to surround myself with people who are constantly starting new ventures and see failure as a normal part of life.

This was very important for me, because I grew up in a household where failure of any kind wasn’t tolerated, so seeing people start things, fail, get up, start something else, succeed, start something else, fail and keep going, helped me change my perception of failure.

It gave me permission to fail at new things and it taught me to get over failure pretty quickly.

I didn't ditch my friends, in fact a lot of the friends that I had then, are still the friends that I have now.

My friends are on their own journey and most of them aren’t interested in entrepreneurship, so they couldn’t help me with my issues around failure and entrepreneurship.

So I went in quest of people who could hold space for me on my entrepreneurial journey and challenge my perception of failure.

Click on the video below to learn more

How is your fear of financial failure holding you back?

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