What Are You Afraid Of?

April 20, 2010

I was told three times last week that I really should watch the Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk about nurturing creativity and overcoming the fear of failure. Being told once is always interesting, twice gets my attention, but three times… hits the blog! Since failure is a favorite topic among us authors (see Failing Your Way to Success, inspired by JK Rowling), I read the signs of this consistent prompting to mean that the subject is quite worthy of more discussion. It’s important because the fear of failure goes hand-in-hand with pursuing anything new and different. And unless we overcome it—we may stop ourselves from doing what we were born to do.

Here’s a liberating perspective of how to deal with fear that Gilbert introduces in her talk:

“I recently wrote this book, this memoir called Eat, Pray, Love which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world and for some reason, became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I’m doomed. Seriously—doomed! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, ‘Aren’t you afraid—aren’t you afraid you’re never going to be able to top that? Aren’t you afraid you’re going to keep writing for your whole life and you’re never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?’ So that’s reassuring, you know. But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I first started telling people—when I was a teenager—that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same kind of, sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, ‘Aren’t you afraid you’re never going to have any success? Aren’t you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren’t you afraid that you’re going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing’s ever going to come of it and you’re going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?’ The answer—the short answer to all those questions is, ‘Yes.’ … But, is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do?”

Gilbert goes on to share the idea (dating back to ancient Rome and Greece) that, instead of the rare person being a genius, all of us have a genius. It is our job to show up and do the work and invite the genius, the divine inspiration, to flow through us. This way if our work is brilliant, we stay humble because we know we had help. But if our work bombs, it’s not entirely our fault—we just know that our genius was temporarily out to lunch.

In my book Professional Destiny, I cover the topic of fear in two chapters. It’s worth such emphasis because nothing stands between us and our greatest work as much as doubt and fear. Fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of not being enough, or fear of not having enough. And unless we find a way to tame our fear, it can stop us from moving forward.

Gilbert gives us a great perspective on how to overcome it: “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment, then ‘Ole!’ And if not, do your dance anyhow. ‘Ole!’ to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.”

Filed under: Doing What You Love,Overcoming Fear

Tags: Elizabeth Gilbert, fear of failure, Overcoming Fear, Professional Destiny, TED