Starting something new, especially when your livelihood is dependent on success can be terrifying. Even more so when you don’t have skill, background knowledge or experience in that industry or career path. Sucking at something can be embarrassing, cause panic and anxiety, and negative emotional response. My advice would be to do it anyway!
In order to overcome the anxiety, the embarrassment of failure, the fear of sucking etc, the most effective self-talk or techniques I’ve employed have been forgiveness of mistakes, managing expectations, and trying again with new knowledge when something fails. Forgiving mistakes is most important. They’re going to happen as we learn new skills, expecting them, dissecting them and learning from them is tremendously valuable in our learning. Expectations of being the next “prodigy” at a new skill right away aren’t realistic for most folks. I’ve learned to get excited about mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes can turn into something else altogether with your learning!
Embarrassment or fear of looking like a fool keeps a lot of would-be talented creatives from trying a new skill or finding a new passion. For me personally, the feeling of embarrassment is a strongly physical thing, I get upset stomach, turn red, the works! But I’ve learned to be Ok with sharing my mistakes, and to change my perspective…”yeah, this one might suck, but it’s going to get better on the next one, and most folks haven’t even taken their first step yet…”. And maybe those feelings of embarrassment and failure can be shared, so that others don’t make the same mistakes.
Failure - you’re going to fail. Most small business fail. The odds of success are long. The amount of work required to be independently successful is much more than work-a-day life. There are a million and one reasons not to try. And I wouldn’t fault anyone for not chasing a dream. But I’m going to chase this one. And when I fail, I’m going to clean up my mess, learn what went wrong, and do it again, glad that I got to learn something. Turning the idea of failure into “another step along the way to doing it right” has been tremendously helpful for me. I even say it out loud when I screw up, which happens to be a lot. When I hear things like “failure is not an option…” I try not to internalize that, as it’s not reality. Failure is an option, a common outcome, going to happen. It’s the “giving up” that’s not optional. -Boody