Tips to overcome your fear about personal development
Sometimes, the fear of uncovering the real you causes you to miss the opportunity of being the real you. Terribly ironic.
Fear, doubt, and apprehension combine to create profound self-doubt, and sometimes that self-doubt spirals into self-sabotage. But you can overcome that doubt, those apprehensions, and the fear and move forward in your personal development.
If you allow your fears to hold you back from working on yourself, that in and of itself is an act of self-sabotage. Children are full of hope and when you were a child you probably believed that you could do anything and more than likely, you were the closest you have been to being your true self.
It’s only as we grow older that we feel more pressure to fall in line with everyone else’s opinions, expectations, and beliefs. The older we get, the harder it becomes, until you reach the age where you stop caring. Here are 15 tips to help you overcome your fears about personal development work.
Live With Purpose
If there is one way to override doubt, fear, and apprehension it’s with purpose. Your doubt might actually be a symptom of your lack of purpose. The why of what you do is important because the why is what provides you with momentum. If you hone in on that this will help you weather any rough road you encounter.
From here on out, when you feel self-doubt creeping in, check your purpose. Fear, doubt, and apprehension can be crippling. To start overcoming yours, find your purpose, determine your values, and get to know yourself.
That’s part of the personal development process, but it’s also something you can start separately from self-improvement. That process should help you ease some of those doubts and fears you feel about personal development.
Your Inner Circle Matters
Who do you spend the majority of your time with? The company you keep can heavily influence you, whether that is positive or negative. If you spend your time with Debbie Downers, then there’s a good chance you are going to turn into something of a Debbie Downer yourself. If you are constantly surrounded by Positive Pattys, then it stands to reason you will also start being a more positive person.
Moods are contagious. Think about it. Have you ever worked somewhere that everyone is on tenterhooks waiting to see what mood the boss is in? If they breeze in with a good morning everyone breathes a sigh of relief and it’s a normal day. If they storm in with a face of thunder the mood in the entire building shifts.
Your inner circle has that much sway with you and if they are negative, miserable, or unkind, then they are going to stimulate those fears, doubts, and apprehensions you feel about personal development. Moreover, they might want to hold you back because they won’t want to be left behind by your growth.
What you want in your inner circle is people who lift you up, encourage you, motivate you, pick you up, brush you off, and run alongside you cheering you on when you need it most.
Nothing is more important to your journey to overcoming fear, doubt, and apprehension than a strong social network that will support you through anything. It isn’t a one-way street, of course, you should be that kind of person to your inner circle as well.
Strong, positive relationships are important so nurture them. Those are the people who will be with you always and it’s beneficial to both your personal development and your mental health to take care of those relationships.
Avoid Making Comparisons
You cannot rely on other people to make your decisions, nor can you expect them to steer you in the right direction. The only person who knows which direction is right for you is you. Your personal development journey is your own and only you know what is right for you.
With that being said, you cannot grow by making comparisons. It doesn’t matter what your next-door neighbor is doing. It doesn’t matter what your siblings, best friends, or arch-nemesis is up to either.
Their judgment of you does not matter, their accomplishments do not matter, and if you think they do you will always feel inadequate. That inadequacy will immerse you in fear, doubt, and apprehension, and with those weighing you down, how will you grow?
Success is not a carbon copy of someone else’s success. It’s different for everyone and you are the person to define what success means to you. You have a wide variety of talents, skills, and abilities, and to walk the right path you need to develop those. Comparison is the thief of joy and that’s not what you want for your life. You are unique and you are capable of facing your fears.
Remember, personal development doesn’t look the same for everyone and if you constantly compare yourself, you are likely to slip into self-hate and resentment. That’s going to hold you back even more. Use yourself as the marker for your growth.
Practice Self-Care
How can you beat fear, doubt, and apprehension about personal development when you lack confidence, feel low, and unloved? Self-care is imperative to human success. You have to look after yourself daily to ensure you are at your best. There’s no room for doubt, fear, or apprehension when you love yourself.
A lot of people slip into anger and self-hate in response to their self-doubt. They’re just mad at themselves for whatever. Beating yourself up to move forward will only push you further backward. That won’t help you. Instead, you should aim for kind, constructive motivational self-talk that overrides all of the negative self-talk that is dragging you down.
Self-care looks different for everyone, but the basics are the same for all of us. You have to eat well, get enough sleep, and hydrate.
Those are the big three, from there you can build your self-care regimen to fit your personality and lifestyle. If you feel self-criticism coming on, flip the switch and turn it into self-compassion.
Be Consistent
Okay, right now you don’t have a plan in place and you might not have a strong idea about the logistics of making things happen. However, you have to start immediately by taking a single step forward towards something that you have fear, doubt, or apprehension about.
It can be anything, though it would be helpful if it was directly related to your desire for personal growth. Having said that, taking a step towards something that terrifies you is an act of personal growth in and of itself.
There’s a voice in the back of your mind and it is telling you to go out and do something, so if you keep stalling and ignoring that voice… it will get quieter and quieter until you drown it out altogether with negativity.
One of the reasons we hold back is a fear of vulnerability. The idea that we expose our wants and wishes and risk failure… it’s paralyzing! There is only one cure for that and that’s to get started!
So, set yourself three small goals and think about what you want to achieve, why you want to achieve them, and what you will need to make it happen. Having strategies and being consistent will make life much easier.
Goals give you direction and if you keep experiencing fear or self-doubt, then your plan might not be fit for purpose. Even if we don’t actively pursue personal development, we still evolve constantly as humans.
You are not the same person you were five years ago and you won’t be the same person five years from now that you are now. Don’t you want to have some control over how you evolve? That’s what personal development is.
Face Your Fear with Curiosity
It’s hard to face your fear when you feel crippled by the risk of failure. It’s important to remember that no one is perfect, nothing is perfect, and perfection is unattainable. Be curious about what you can learn on the journey.
Failure is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it is game over! When you fail, you fall, and then you pick yourself up and you go again. Every failure comes with a lesson (or more than one), so you have to think about failure as a learning opportunity rather than the end of the world.
It comes down to mindset and if you believe you are worthy then you will do what it takes. If there is something that you have been avoiding because of doubt, fear, or apprehension, now is the time to act. Disrupt your negative thought patterns and take the plunge.
Before you do, ask yourself what’s the worst that could happen because it’s never as bad as it seems. Start by making a list of why you don’t think you can do it and write another list about why you believe you can.
Write it out so you can use it as motivation and ideally, the list of why you can should be longer than the other. Often, doubt makes us rationalize things to fit our emotions. You might be scared to fail, you might be afraid to take on more responsibility or to look bad, but you are capable.
Challenge Your Inner Critic
Your inner critic plays a major role in doubt and fear. You see a job listing and you think it sounds like the perfect match for your skills. As soon as you submit your resume you start to question whether you’re capable of filling the role. By the time you get a call for an interview, you are filled with doubt and apprehension.
You don’t think you have what it takes. You have what it takes and you need to correct your inner critic and let it know it’s wrong. The longer you allow yourself to stay stuck in an emotion (or a situation) the harder it becomes to escape it.
So, to overcome your inner critic, start by celebrating past success. You deserve credit for everything you have achieved thus far. You have been through some hard times and even though you can’t picture it when it’s happening, you always come out on top! When the inevitable uncertainty comes your way, you need to reflect on your successes and push the negatives aside.
As tempting and as easy as it is to focus on the negatives, you have to shift your focus on to what’s going right and use that to propel you forward. If your mind is constantly telling you that you can’t do a particular thing, then your behavior will believe it and that’s why you need to challenge your inner critic.
You have to learn to recognize when your subconscious thoughts are veering in the wrong direction. It will take time, but it’s a great way to monitor your state of mind.
Don’t let your inner critic hijack your personal development journey.
Failure Beats Regret
When you feel a twinge of fear at the prospect of failure, there is one certain way to stop it right in its tracks and that is to remember that regrets are far worse than a failure could ever be.
I wish that I had… If only I… I should have… forget that. Grab hold of one of those I’s and flip it on its head to become an I will.
Between the two, one will last far longer than the other and deep down, you know that failure fades while regret lingers. Think about both, the failures you have experienced and the regrets that you hold onto. Which ones hurt more? For me, it doesn’t matter how much distance I put between myself and those regrets, they still sting.
When I look at my failures it’s much easier to shrug them off as something that simply wasn’t mean to be. It might have been difficult at the time, it was disappointing, but at least I gave it my best shot.
The regrets are the things you never bothered to put yourself out there to try or do or act on. When you reach the end of your life, you won’t be thinking about your failures, but you will likely consider those regrets.
There won’t be a “what if” if you go out and do whatever it is you’re so afraid of failing at. Put yourself in the best position to succeed and go for it.
Identify the Root
What is it that you are so afraid of? Why are you holding onto those doubts or apprehensions? What is it that is holding you back? Where does this fear or doubt regarding failure originate? Find the root cause, acknowledge it, and then overcome your fear.
Everyone has a different way to figure it out but find a quiet place to relax and think about when your fear or doubt started. Once you have determined a timeline, you can drill down into why it started.
For example, you may have a fear of public speaking and the reason for this stretches back to junior high when you flubbed your lines delivering your oral book report. It wasn’t that big a deal, but you were facing an audience of 12-year-olds and they giggled as you slipped up and struggled to get yourself back on track. You walked away with an A, but all you could focus on was the tittering laughs of your classmates.
It didn’t matter that almost everyone had similar issues when it was their turn. All you could focus on was your experience and how awful it felt to be laughed at. You didn’t fail, but you walked away feeling as though you had.
It might not have been something like that, it could have been getting caught in an elevator breakdown or almost drowning as a small child. Those types of fears often follow us around and if you don’t take steps to expose yourself to your fears, they will follow you forever. Afraid of water? Spend time in the shallow end splashing around. If that’s too scary, fill up a kiddie pool and start there. Go get in an elevator, if that’s too much at once, then start with a small closet and work up to the bigger step of riding the elevator.
Whatever the root, if you examine it now through different eyes, you might realize what little impact it should have had on your life rather than taking over every facet of who you are. You deserve to be the best you possible and you can’t become that version of yourself until you invest in personal development.
Eyes on the Prize
Once you identify the cause of your fear or doubt, you can focus on your goals. Keep your eyes on the prize! When your mind starts whispering you can’t do this because… then you have to recalibrate and tackle some smaller tasks that feed your ultimate goal and keep you moving forward.
If you want to conquer your fears and doubts, then you have to set your mind solely on the outcome that you would like to create. The more you focus on the prize, the easier it is to eradicate pessimism.
Avoiding your fears and indulging your doubts only makes it that much scarier. What it is, by facing it, it will fade. So, make your plans and do what it takes to carry them out.
Eyes Forward, Keep Moving Ahead
Once you improve your mindset and recognize that you are in control and not the victim that you have painted yourself as, you can focus on moving forward. Your destiny is in your hands and the only way to make it happen is to take action.
No one else can do that for you. No one can enroll you in further education and complete the degree you want to pursue. Nobody is going to apply for your dream job and ace the interview for you. No one will carry out your self-reflection and learn what you want from life. It’s all up to you. With that in mind, you need to keep your eyes forward (on that prize) and keep moving ahead.
Never Say Never
If you constantly say no or never to yourself, then you steal away any chance of hope you have. You have to be your own best motivator because you’re definitely already your own worst detractor. It’s time to flip the script! One way to do that is to examine the worst-case scenario – let it play out in your mind for a few moments just to prove how ridiculous the fear is. Or another is to think about how you would advise a friend who shared your same fear. Either way the key is to be open to the possibilities in moving forward.
Follow Your Inner Guide
Once you’re in tune with yourself keep trusting your instinct and follow your inner guide. You have to trust yourself, both to take the plunge and to control the plunge you take.
The doubts that whisper in the background have to stay in the background because that isn’t your inner guide, it’s your inner critic. It’s imperative that you can distinguish between the two. You have to trust yourself instead of listening to opposition or arguments waging war against you. If you’re wrong? Who cares? Again, what’s the worst-case scenario? Wouldn’t you rather be wrong than living with regrets?
When you feel overcome by fear or doubts, you have to trust your inner guide. You are in possession of the solutions to all of your problems, past, present, and future. That inner guide is far more powerful than any other influence could hope to be. Failure comes from a lack of self-trust, but even if you fail it’s not the end of the world, it’s just a new beginning.
Patience Is A Virtue
Nobody determines your journey, no one determines the destination or the path that you take to get there. You can allow others to influence you on your journey, but ultimately, you are the only one who can make the final decision regarding how to proceed.
Who do you make your decisions for? Is it for you? Is it for your happiness and personal development? Or do you make decisions to make everyone else happy?
It’s going to be a long road and patience is a necessary virtue to nurture. It might take a long time, you may have to take a dozen detours, there may be windy, rocky roads littered with obstacles… you have to keep going. When you fail, you fail forward. The only way to fail backward is to stay standing still.
Just Breathe
You can’t think clearly when you are flooded with doubt, fear, and apprehension. So, the first thing you need to do is take a time out. You need to physically calm yourself before you can do anything else.
There are a variety of ways you can distract yourself, from taking a walk to hopping in a shower, taking a bath, or even having a hot or fizzy beverage. That’s fine and well if you’re in the comfort of your home, but if you’re out and about or at work, then breathing is the best way to calm yourself.
If you feel your palms sweating and your heart rate increasing, then don’t fight it. Give yourself permission to feel the panic and don’t distract yourself from it. Place your hand (palm down) on your stomach and start taking slow, deep breaths. This will help you calm your mind while also acclimatizing you to panic. By doing so, you remove the fear of fear and the fear of doubt.
You can take it to the next step by visualizing your happy place and retreating to it when you need positive feelings to soothe you.
Final Thoughts
Moving forward, I hope you believe in yourself and recognize that you possess the skills and abilities to develop personally. You can be humble and confident in yourself at the same time. Do not allow fear, doubt, or apprehension to hold you back.
You are going to evolve as a human being whether you realize it’s happening or not, but personal development is the tool you need to control that evolution.
