I believe everything we need to succeed is inside us as children, but it gets slowly pushed out of us as we grow older. By the time we’re teenagers, we’ve forgotten these lessons or been forced to bury them. Here's how to get back a few of those great qualities you had as a kid that kept your mind open to possibility & made life fun, interesting & full of hope:
Learn to enjoy failure. Everything you did as a kid requires trying & failing. Climbing a tree, riding a bike or tying your shoes all forced you to fumble & fail. But you did not care. Mistakes were just part of the process. You had no embarrassment or shame – only a desire to go faster to learn & master all of the exciting things that were ahead of you. Ridding yourself from fear of failure means you let go of what other people think about you. The obsession with perfection, fearing mistakes & failure ruins opportunities & destroys your potential. Failures teach you valuable lessons just like they did when you were young.
Start asking. We asked questions all the time because we were curious. As adults, we have let go of that great skill. Instead, we assume what people are thinking, what they will do & how they will answer our question. We assume they won’t buy, they won’t help or that they are not interested. Now that may be true, but how do you know for sure? Rejection is all around. Avoiding rejection from others means you reject yourself first! Give other people the opportunity to say no & don’t make assumptions.
Don’t take no for an answer. We need to remember the tenacity we had as kids. One ‘no’ from someone was the opening of the conversation. It was the starting place to getting to where we wanted to go. We got creative and bargained, learning how to persuade and convince. It was a great skill! So don’t take that ‘no’ so easily and remember that it is often the beginning of a relationship and often ends in a yes if we are patient and positively persistent.
Andrea Waltz is passionate about helping people overcome the fear of the word NO & feelings of failure & rejection that go along with it. With her husband & business partner Richard Fenton, she has made her mission to liberate people from fears of failure & rejection - sharing an entire new mindset about hearing the word NO. For more information, visit goforno.com.