Women are 10 times more likely to be deterred by their fear of failure
Many people encounter fear when they are about to start a new business or project! One of the most prominent fears that we can face in a startup scene is a fear of failure and a recent survey carried out by GEM shows us that women are 10 times more likely to be deterred by their fear of failure than their male counterparts (GEM 2018/2019). It is therefore important to address this topic properly! Our expert Ester Liquori is going to explain to us in this lesson what the fear of failure exactly is and what we can do about it below!
Transcript
Fear of failure is something that stops you in what you’re doing, what you want to grow. It’s kind of a wall that stops you to go forward where you want to go. And there are some things that shape the failure, the procrastination, perfectionism and the low self confidence. All those three are part of a kind of failure because if you procrastinate, as a matter of fact, you have fear of going ahead. You are saying “I will do that tomorrow” and maybe that tomorrow never comes. So this is one of the point where you are, as a matter of fact, stopping yourself, stopping your growth as well as the perfectionism because perfectionism is another way of saying “it’s not perfect, I can’t publish that, I can’t go after with that, I can’t show that to the world”. No, particularly in the entrepreneur life, you need to test, you need it to go outside, you need to publish your website publish, your text and show what you want to show, so that you can receive feedback. And feedback is obviously another main point because you are exposing yourself to the public. And maybe you fear that people are not agreeing with you, but that’s perfectly normal because nobody can be perfectly aligned with what you are thinking. But this is the way of a in which you grow. Everything is part of you, so you need to embrace this imperfection to grow towards the end.
The fear is a huge part in what you do because obviously as we said with procrastination and with the perfectionism, you are not feeling comfortable sometimes in what you are doing. That’s it. This is mainly what make the difference among female and male approach. Male very often are not just better than us, just bolder than us. They try most, they are not saying that they are cheating, it’s simply that they don’t care is to be perfect. We as females, we want to be perfect because of the thousands of years of people that say that we are not good, that we have to care about the family and what about that – we have to care about us.
Business obviously are affected by our actions. And the, once again, if we fear to go ahead, we fear of doing what we need to do, we can’t move. As a, the CEO of my company, I very often needed to present what we doing to usually a male audience. There are a lot of investors, usually investors are men and they look at me and say “okay, this is, this girl is going to speak about artificial intelligence”. Yes, it’s true. I know the field is mine its my business. So maybe I can even teach something to you about that. I will learn a lot from you on about how to approach investment, how to spend better the money, probably, but I know my own field. So everyone has his own knowledge. Don’t be shy, try yourself, be strong and don’t get fear.
