Fear Upon Fear

Fear Upon Fear

I’ve come across people whose life is one long frightened march through fear. They fear trying to find a buyer. They fear talking to a buyer. They fear creating a proposal when the buyer is interested. They fear not being able to deliver when a proposal is signed.

I’ve met people with no business at all, who have three proposals in front of prospects, who fear that all three will be accepted and they won’t be able to handle the work!

Sound familiar to anyone?

We can’t live our lives in perpetual fear. Otherwise, residing on what is nothing but a huge rock moving through space at 85,000 miles per hour around a constantly exploding star should pretty much keep you in bed all day. But somehow we venture out. We drive on the highway, overcoming the fear that someone else who is distracted and angry may do something stupid and hit us before we can react. We overcome the fear of illness sufficiently to move about he streets and workplace with thousands of people carrying billions of bugs.

When you ask yourself, “What’s the alternative?” and the answer is “starvation,” or “death” you tend to be motivated to get something done. But when the answer is “annoyance” or “discomfort” or “a bruised ego” we should be that much more eager to run forward, because the alternative’s adverse consequences are minor.

When it comes to “fight or flight” we should be prepared to fight more, metaphorically speaking. We should face the buyer, stand before the audience, write the article, argue with the loudmouth, take the risk. There are people who fear their own shadow, and people who fear to even look for their shadow. Eventually, they leave no shadow.

Stop fearing the positive, the opportunistic, the potentially valuable. Stop seeing risk and remorse behind every initiative and innovation.

While there’s no empirical proof showing that there absolutely cannot be a monster under the bed or in the closet, your experience, I trust, is that you’ve never found one. Use that basis as your guide, and stop fearing the improbable, impossible, and implausible.

If you have so much business that you can’t handle it, give me a call and I’ll take it off your hands. I don’t want you to be afraid….

© Alan Weiss 2012.