Here’s how to change your mind about failure. And, learn to enjoy it.
While some forms of anxiety require the help of medical professionals, entrepreneurs can learn to enjoy and even benefit from flops or even catastrophic attempts at innovation by knowing which levers to pull to change how they view and experience failure.
Get to know your neurons.
Our brains contain 1 billion neurons that ignite each of our five senses. Neurons learn from the past to create the present. Someone with entrepreneurial tendencies, you will have tried something new several times in your life. Every time you enter a similar experience, your neurons send signal to your brain of what to feel based on previous experiences and mounting, resulting perceptions. As you enter into a potentially anxiety-inducing experience, learn to preemptively orchestrate a new conversation in your head. You are not the victim of your neurons. You can control what your neurons signal to your brain. Be willing to question your fears as well as your sources of inspiration. Neurons create habits. Your job is to test your repetitive reactions, get rid of habitual feelings that no longer serve you and replace them with ones that do.
Identify the “why” of your mindsets.
Mindsets are critical because they determine what we believe, what we value, and the actions we take. Our mindsets are also riddled with unconscious biases that are informed from our neurons. There are about 150 different unconscious biases swirling around in our brains just at work! If your mindset is one that values comfort, trying something big for the first time may not happen. If your mindset believes that being uncomfortable for periods of time indicate that you are doing something big and may be on the verge of a big breakthrough, then you possess and can act upon your trained grit, according to this article.
Disrupt unconscious bias in your decision-making.
Entrepreneurs get so focused on the problem they want to solve or the innovation they want to birth that they forget to get outside of their heads. For most entrepreneurs, this has always been the way of life. Use every opportunity to detect, prevent and eventually replace your harmful unconscious biases that hinder progress and induce anxiety. Nothing, the perceived good or the bad, lasts forever so why let your neurons and mindset believe otherwise.
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