“Always do what you are afraid to do.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Does fear stop you from becoming your best?  Is fear an obstacle to building on your strengths?  Our fear of weaknesses can overshadow our confidence in our strengths.  Our fear of failure can stop us from giving our all.  The ultimate fear that can hold us back is fear of who we really are.

I find that sometimes the most important growth is painful.  One of my mentors has a saying for this "… that’s what growth feels like."  I’m in a challenging environment and I see people fail all the time.  In fact, when people aren’t failing, they aren’t trying hard enough.  There is no failure, only lessons.  Sometimes the most difficult lesson is when somebody finds out they aren’t cut out for the job they’re in.  But even this usually turns out to be a blessing in disguise.  This is where I’ve seen people pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and follow a new path of their strengths.

In the book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D., teach us about the fears that limit your potential.

Key Take Aways
Here are my key take aways:

• Fear can hold you back.  Fear of weakness, fear of failure, and fear of who you are hold you back from becoming your best.
• Improving weaknesses doesn’t make you great.  Investing in your weaknesses is not the path to greatness.  Fixing your weaknesses only limits your failure, it doesn’t improve your success.
• Strengths are the path to greatness.  Shift from a weakness orientation to a strengths orientation.   The secret to improvement lies in understanding your strengths.  When you follow your strengths and you fail, it might be the wrong time, or the wrong place, or just the start of your journey.
• Leverage and lead with your strengths.  Accept your weak points as is, leverage and lead with your strengths.  Unless you have significant liabilities, in which case, work on your weaknesses but that isn’t enough, it’s more important to find where your strengths work.

3 Fears that Can Hold You Back
According to Buckingham and Clifton, the three fears that hold you back are:

• Fear of weaknesses
• Fear of failure
• Fear of who you are

Fear of Weaknesses
We assume our weaknesses trump our strengths. 

Buckingham and Clifton write:

“For many of us our fear of our weaknesses seems to overshadow our confidence in our strengths.  To use an analogy, if life is a game of cards and each of us has been dealt our hand of strengths and weaknesses, most of us assume that our weaknesses trump our strengths.”

Weaknesses Get Our Attention
We see our weaknesses as opportunities, over our strengths.  That’s the pitfall — assuming that the weakness is an area of opportunity.

Buckingham and Clifton write:

“For example, if we excel at selling but struggle with strategy, it is our difficulty with strategy that gets the attention because an inability to think strategically will surely hurt us somewhere down the line, won’t it?  If we build trusting relationships with ease but falter when it comes to making presentations, we sign up for the ubiquitous public speaking class because public speaking is a prerequisite for success, isn’t it?  Whatever the weakness, whatever the strength is just a strength – to be admired and then simply assumed – but the weakness, ah, the weakness is an ‘area of opportunity.’”

Our Fixation with Weakness is Deeply Rooted
We learn early on to focus on what’s wrong with us, over what’s right with us. 

Buckingham and Clifton write:

“This fixation with weakness is deeply rooted in our education and upbringing.  We presented parents with this scenario: Say your child returns home with the following grades: an A in English, an A in social studies, a C in biology, and an F in algebra.  Which of these grades would you spend the most time discussing with your sons or daughter? Seventy-seven percent of parents chose to focus on the F in algebra, only 6 percent on the A in English, and an even more minuscule number, 1 percent, on the A in social studies.  Obviously, the algebra grade requires some attention because to progress in school and secure a place at a college or university, the child cannot afford to fail a subject.  But the question was phrased quite carefully:  Which of these grades would you spend the most time discussing with your son or daughter?  Despite the demands of today’s education system, does the most time really deserve to be invested in the child’s weakness?”

“All failures are not created equal.  Some are fairly easy to digest, usually those where we can explain away the failure without tarnishing our self-image.  It may sound a little different in kinder-garten (‘Hey, I wasn’t ready!’) than it does in the working world (‘I’m afraid that’s not my specialty’), but the principle is the same.  When the cause of the failure seems to have nothing to do with who we really are, we can accept it.  But some failures stick in our threat and lodge there.  Of this kind the most persistent and the most damaging are those times when we pick out one of our strengths, stake a claim, go all out, and yet still fail.  The anguish that accompanies this kind of failure can be acute.  Do you remember the scene in the film Chariots of Fire where the runner Abrahams turns to his girlfriend after losing a race for which he had prepared diligently and in a stunned whisper confesses, ‘I just don’t think I can run any faster’?”

What If Your Strengths Aren’t Good Enough?
What if your best isn’t good enough? 

Buckingham and Clifton write:

“Whether we are competitive like Abrahams or judge ourselves against our own standards, our sense of failure is most pervasive whenever we reach down, call upon our strengths, and they are found wanting.  Despite society’s well-intentioned advice to ‘try, try again,’ at times like these we can start to feel a little desperate.  ‘I identified a talent, cultivated it into a strength, claimed it, practiced it, and still failed! So where do I turn now?’”

Your Strengths are Your Talents, Not Your Diplomas
It’s easier to point to external validation, than to trust your talents. 

Buckingham and Clifton write:

“In part this explains why, when asked to describe their strengths, people rarely refer to their natural talents.  Instead, they talk about external things that they have gathered during their life, such as certificates and diplomas, experiences and awards.  Here is the ‘proof’ that they have improved themselves, that they have acquired something valuable to offer”"

Don’t Miss the Wonders of Your Strength
What if your best you stays shackled for a lifetime? 

Buckingham and Clifton write:

“We do want to remind you, however, that if you stop investigating yourself for fear of how little you might find, you will miss the wonder of your strengths.  We say ‘remind’ because so many of us take our strengths for granted.  We live with them every day, and they come so easily to us that they cease to be precious.  Like the New Yorker who no longer hears the sirens and the horns, we are so close to our strengths that we don’t see them anymore.”

My Related Posts

• Real and Durable Confidence
• Finding Your Strengths
• Fear of Becoming Who You Truly Are
• Secrets of Self-Esteem
• Why It’s Great to Be Able to Make Mistakes
• Test Your Can’ts
• How To Figure out What You Really Want

Photo by Capture Queen.

Does fear of failure hold you back?  Don’t be the person in your life that holds you back.  Be the first person that picks you up when you fall down.

Perfectionism can get in the way of your best results.  Don’t let it push your off your path.  Mistakes are a part of life.  You can either embrace them and find the lessons, or you can try to avoid them and become a shadow of your potential self.

In Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated, David Burns teaches us why it’s great to be able to make mistakes.

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• The make mistakes path is unlimited.  I think contrasting two paths, helps illustrate the point. The fear of failure path is limiting and stressful. The make mistakes and learn path is unlimited.
• Avoiding mistakes limits your growth.  If you operate under a mindset where you can’t take chances or make mistakes, you limit your growth and your experiences. Additionally, you get worse at dealing with mistakes because you always try to avoid them.
• Make mistakes and learn.  If you operate under the mindset that you can make mistakes and learn, you stay in the game, grow and adapt. I think you also get better at dealing with mistakes. This can be anything from your own self-talk, to a support network, to your approaches for learning.
• It’s when you stop getting on your horse, that you slide down.  If you keep getting knocked off your horse, but you keep getting back on, you get stronger, faster, and continue to climb. I think in life you’re either climbing or sliding, and it’s when you stop getting on your horse that you slide down.

Why It’s Great to Be Able to Make Mistakes
Burns writes the following:

1. I fear mistakes because I see everything in absolutist, perfectionist terms — one mistake and the whole is ruined. This is erroneous. A small mistake certainly doesn’t ruin an otherwise fine whole.
2. It’s good to make mistakes because then we learn — in fact, we won’t learn unless we make mistakes. No one can avoid making mistakes — and since it’s going to happen in any case, we may as well accept it and learn from it.
3. Recognizing our mistakes helps us adjust our behavior so that we can get results we’re more pleased with — so we might say that mistakes ultimately operate to make us happier and to make things better.
4. If we fear making mistakes, we become paralyzed — we’re afraid to do or try anything, since we might (in fact, probably will) make some mistakes. If we restrict our activities so that we won’t make mistakes, then we are really defeating ourselves. The more we try and the more mistakes we make, the faster we’ll learn, and the happier we’ll be ultimately.
5. Most people aren’t going to be mad at us or dislike us because we make mistakes — they all make mistakes, and most people feel uncomfortable around “perfect” people.
6. We don’t die if we make mistakes.

My Related Posts

• 13 Negative Motivation Patterns
• 10 Distorted Thinking Patterns
• Fear of Becoming Who You Truly Are
• How To Overcome Resistance
• How Experts Make Decisions

Photo by kaibara87