This text first appeared here on brigitte.de.
Fear, like all our feelings, is a very meaningful and valuable emotion – unless we let it guide us without questioning it. Then it can happen that our fear locks us in and we miss out on important experiences that could enrich and help us. Because often we are afraid of something that is actually only good for us.
Admittedly, failures aren’t exactly funny. They give us really nasty dampeners and scratch our self-confidence. But we survive them, often even unscathed and enriched by a few experiences – and that should outweigh a short-term bad feeling for us. The problem with the fear of failure is that it often develops into a fear of trying. But if we try nothing, nothing can succeed. On the other hand, the more often we fail and experience that the world will not end as a result, the more courageously and openly we accept new challenges.
Almost everyone is afraid of change because it is always associated with uncertainty: will it make our lives better or worse? We’d rather hold on to something we know and know we can handle than choose the unknown. But changes also offer us a wonderful opportunity: to discover new sides and abilities in ourselves and to learn more about life than what we already know. Strictly speaking, life consists of changes anyway, nothing stays the same forever. In this respect, our fear of it doesn’t do us any good anyway, except maybe that we delay changes for so long or resist them until it’s no longer possible. But wouldn’t it be nicer and much more elegant to voluntarily accept it and get involved with it?
One of the things that scares us about letting go is that we are giving up something we are used to holding on to. It may not sound all that terrible, but in practice it is extremely difficult. But the good thing about letting go is that it relieves us and creates space for something new.
Getting negative feedback always feels silly. After all, we like it when others like who we are and what we do (unless we’re a rebellious teen and it’s our parents or teachers). But there is something good about criticism, regardless of the content, whether it is constructive and whether we can improve with its help: it teaches us that it is not necessary to be liked by others! Only when we receive criticism do we experience that we can take it. And that the opinion of others does not make us a worse person. No matter what we do and how hard we try, we can never please everyone anyway. But when our fear of criticism is breathing down our necks, it’s hard to accept…
Making mistakes is part of life. Through them we learn and grow beyond ourselves. The primary reason why we are afraid of making mistakes is that we are paying attention and trying hard – it’s totally okay! But when fear becomes too great, it can result in not acknowledging our mistakes (and subsequently learning from them) or not daring to do anything that we can do wrong (and thus miss out on an opportunity to grow). and become more confident).
