Fear of Failure & My Story

In last week's article I wrote about Moving Beyond Fear. It was very much seeing fear from a general perspective as an all-pervasive aspect of our existence - a mechanism ingrained to keep us from venturing into uncharted, dangerous waters (i.e. the unknown). Fear is a basic instinct to preserve us and keep us alive. It's an aspect of our subconscious mind. The subconscious mind operates a dual function of survival and efficiency. So it forms habits to create efficiency in our mode of operation which are mostly attuned to fear in order to protect us.

One of the modern scourge's of this innate tendency to be fearful is the effect it has on our belief system. It makes us second-guess our every move, it makes us question our abilities and our intuition. It requires us to see the evidence of the fruits of our labour even before we take the plunge into unknown waters. Therefore, the antithesis of fear is faith.

Success is not the province of someone truly talented, experienced, qualified, ideally placed, better connected or indeed "lucky". If you were to look at the hallmarks of a successful person, you would see some common traits. You would see that they fully believe in themselves, that they have a burning desire or ambition and they NEVER, EVER GIVE UP, even when the evidence of their 5 senses suggests that they do!

You don't have to look far to see some incredible and very famous examples of this: Thomas Edison, J K Rowling, Colonel Sanders, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, Michael Jordan, even Bill Gates was a Harvard drop-out.

Einstein was quoted as saying:

Success is failure in progress

My story (and I have a few others, but this is the most profound to me) is told to you to let you know that the biggest reason why we fail is that we stop believing in ourselves. This happens because we either don't heed our intuition and go blindly in pursuit of unaligned goals, or we lose focus, we allow "external events" to affect and offset our attention, commitment and dedication to the end goal.

I started my first business not long after giving birth to my youngest son. I had just turned 45 years of age and whilst on maternity leave hatched a plan to open a continental-style coffee shop along with my husband. We were fired up, motivated and enthusiastic. We were rejected first by the property portfolio owners for the first location we wanted to site the shop at. We were then let down at the 11th hour, literally the day before signing the shop lease, by the bank who declined to lend us the promised capital to invest in the business. But our zeal to accomplishing the goal was not extinguished. We remained hopeful and optimistic and had already a Plan B in place (lease finance and additional mortgage) to fund the business. This was for a shop in a second choice location closer to our home.

It wasn't truly plain sailing in the beginning: we had an issue with one of our principal suppliers with late deliveries and not so fresh produce. So we decided to switch tactics and make sandwiches, paninis and salads in-house. That decision actually turned out to our advantage and improved our profit margins considerably.

All our hard work, enthusiasm, focus and commitment paid off. We hit 75% of our very ambitious turnover goal in the first year of trading and then we doubled it in year 2 (with a healthy gross profit margin of almost 75%). We were inventive with the menu, we did our marketing and we looked after our customers. I succeeded in obtaining not just 1, but 3 awards in that second year of trading, including the first ever Caerphilly Business Forum Women in Business Award, established to recognise trail-blazing women in business. We were on a "high" and things were going well.

But then my husband got caught up by the idea of transferring the business to a bigger city location (Cardiff, our capital city of Wales), where our uniqueness would be better appreciated by "a more affluent and cosmopolitan audience". So we took appropriate action to "engineer" and orchestrate this. He promised me that he/we would find a buyer for the original shop and the sale of this would go towards the new investment.

However, something was "off-key" to me. My intuition was telling me that something was not right. Only with hindsight and training in energy awareness & alignment do I know that it was an incongruent and out of flow step for me. K(h)armic events are a sign that you are not in coherent energy and are not being authentic with your Divine self (your true path). But my husband was adamant and convinced that we would have more growth opportunities in a more affluent location. This was not actually in our original business plan. The plan was to invest in a mobile van/unit to serve local business parks and sell at outdoor events.

My husband can be very persuasive, so I fell in line with this decision, disregarding all original plans. However, this decision started a cascade of not so positive events.

• We couldn't sell the first business, so we ended up running the 2 simultaneously which led to extreme overwhelm, burnout and exhaustion.
• The only "quick" way of financing a second shop was by setting up a SIPP - a self-invested personal pension, which included cashing in a lucrative, final salary scheme pension.
• The solicitor that was recommended to us by a neighbouring shop was inept and extremely slow. It meant that I had to pore over legal documents myself, often until 3 in the morning - the only time I had available with an existing business and young family to look after. The Cardiff shop owners changed hands in the time it took, so the the lease had to be redrafted. The end result was that it cost us double the money than if we'd gone to our original solicitors who handled the lease on our first shop.
• With delayed access to the shop, our builder took on another job and wasn't immediately available when we had the keys. We had to wait another 3 weeks to start the work.
• The condition of the shop in Cardiff was worse than anticipated. We had to re-sand and varnish all 3 floors (it was a narrow shop in a Victorian arcade). The boiler kept breaking down. The protracted renovations meant we had to delay opening.
• My husband overspent the budget getting additional "hands to the pump" to get the shop open. But I think it was a case of too many cooks spoiled the broth. Everything seemed chaotic to me, but I couldn't get too involved as I was still running the other business in our local town.
• We opened on a wet September day, missing an entire summer of lovely weather and tourist traffic. Footfall was sluggish to say the least.
• Within 2 weeks of opening, we had an emergency call from Greece. My husband's mother had collapsed and had been hospitalised. We then discovered she was suffering from malnutrition and dehydration as a result of unconscious self-neglect. Due to preparations for the business we didn't even get the message about her Alzheimer's diagnosis earlier that year.
• My own mother's health started to nose-dive and I was constantly concerned about how her worrying about me, my young boys and the business was affecting her immune system (compromised by a long-term diagnosis of lymphoma).
• 5 months into trading at the Cardiff shop, I noticed my husband becoming more and more morose and withdrawn. I saw the warning signs and could see him slipping into depression. It was only 13 years earlier that he tried to take his own life when one of his earlier businesses failed, leaving him with £30K of debt. This time, however, the debt was more than double that. Admittedly, it was mostly comprised of a debt to myself (having invested nearly my entire pension), but I could see failure and guilt writ large in his demeanour. He was also traumatised by his most beloved mother's rapidly declining health. So I made the only logical decision I could at that time and that was to withdraw. Sell the business and let it go.

Now you could say that we had a string of bad luck and negative circumstances. But I categorically NOW know that ALL of what we experienced was a projection of our own energy. Simply put: our external world mirrors our inner world. We are the CAUSE to the EFFECT. When we start to feel something is wrong or out of sync with our intrinsic self, that's when we need to pay attention, ask ourselves deep, meaningful questions and if necessary redirect our energy.

The real problem is that fear is often the instinctive, reactive energy or default force that we rely on and respond to. Fear, whilst an emotion, stems from our mind. Fear is essentially an illusion (someone last week commented False Experiences Appearing Real) and it prevents us from listening to our heart's wisdom and our inner intuition. Fear causes us to make knee-jerk, clouded and misaligned decisions.

Another thing about energy is that the more energy (attention and focus) you give something, the more it expands. So if the energy is centred around worry, anxiety and fear, the more experiences we will invite into our reality to generate those feelings.

The role of our subconscious mind is key. It not only creates our experience in the 3D physical world, it is extremely fertile ground for the seeds we sow there. It will react to whatever we feed it in terms of our emotions and will amplify it.

Very often, the success to failure path is just a reflection of our energy and the patterns we have embedded in our subconscious mind. And sometimes, those patterns are inherited. So in my case, doing the energy work around fear of failure, I've discovered that I've absorbed some of the experiences and cellular memory from my father, who himself went through alternate waves of success and failure.

To stay on a trajectory of success, we need to work on our inherent fears and ingrained patterns of beliefs and behaviours. What we believe, we feel and what we feel, we enact and attract. So when we begin to release the negative energy of fear and doubt and step into the energy of our potential and faith in ourselves as positive, inspired and creative beings, as well as have a method to do this consistently, guess what? We experience more consistent success, fulfilment and happiness.

However, I have to say that my various failures, the coffee shop one in particular, have intuitively led me towards learning, self-discovery and energy healing work. I wouldn't have been receptive to this type of self-development work otherwise. Another major advantage is that I can see the warning signs that my clients evidence when they're acting out of fear or when they are not in alignment with themselves. It helps me to guide them back onto the right track to make the right decision: one that is in harmony with their intuitive self and one that will lead to abundance in all its guises.

I've put together a free 1-hour masterclass on this very topic of Believing in Your Success, which I will be conducting in my Facebook group Banquet of Life on 12th May at 12 noon BST. I'll be talking more about the energy of creation for good (or bad) and explain some techniques and tools you can use to smooth out the path to self-belief, energy coherence and ultimately success.

If you're not on Facebook, just DM me here on LinkedIn and I'll chat with you how you can get a copy of the training.

And just for transparency, if you like the methods I share in this training, you can always reach out to me and find out more about how to use these under my tutelage to gain even more self-awareness, ways to shift what's not serving you and align to a version of you that creates massive impact and positive results in your life.