Fear of Failure Holds Us All Back Naturally and Automatically
We are hardwired to be creatures of habit. Our reticular activating system is always scanning the horizon looking for danger. This creates the bubble of safety we call our comfort zone.
As doctors, we have a number of comfort zones. Your personal comfort zone when you're away from work is one. At work, you have a comfort zone inside the boundaries of your specialty - the things you're comfortable doing with patients and the things you aren't (many of which are due to previous bad outcomes).
In order to keep us safe, we have a cognitive bias against doing anything new. We stay inside the protective walls of our personal comfort zone at work and at home.
The boundary guard of our comfort zone is fear of failure.
If we do something new it might not work out the way we planned.
We've learned to understand that as FAILURE, and avoid it at all costs
At the same time, all of us are constantly reaching for new goals and learning new skills. Check that ... All of us aspire to reach new goals and learn new skills.
Fear of failure can bring any outside-the-comfort-zone excursion to a screeching halt.
Things might not work out the way we planned. It's risky. I haven't got time for that. So ... we default to just getting busy again.
And as a doctor, you can always find something to get busy with. The Whirlwind is complicit in reinforcing the walls of our comfort zone.
In this post, you'll discover a way to redefine failure, to eliminate it completely from your vocabulary and your life experience at work and at home. It's a very simple mental exercise for scientists like you and me.
You see ... anytime you do something new, it's just another experiment - like the ones we did as undergrads. Let me show you how this mind flip works so you can stretch your boundaries, learn new skills, reach new goals and enjoy the ride.
Check it out.
