Fear can be paralysing, particularly fear of failure if you’re operating in a field where you’re seen to have experience. After a few conversations on this recently, I wanted to reflect on some ideas that will probably be familiar but we sometimes forget.

Failing is essential to growth. If you don’t get things wrong, often you don’t remember how to do them right. This came up in talking to my step-father about his art group today. The students are reluctant to try to sketch portraits because they’re scared that they won’t produce a likeness. Yet, if you never try to draw, how do you get better? There will be no next time when you realise not to add that shade in that way, etc.

I reflected that this is true in many areas of life. I’ve been discussing the concept of ‘failing fast’ with colleagues recently – we need to work quickly, try things, and adapt approach if it doesn’t work. For that to happen, we need to have courage because the stakes will feel like they’re increasing with every attempt.

I’ll use the example of this blog. I set it up back in September 2020 and very quickly posted 3 articles with no real pressure because no one knew how to find it. Having reminded myself I knew how to string a sentence together, I started posting to Twitter and LinkedIn. Each post was ‘having a go’ and some resonated with people and some have gone by more quietly. My last post at the end of January garnered the biggest number of readers to the site. This was both rewarding, knowing that I was writing about something interesting to people, but it also made me nervous about what to post next. I was scared there were expectations to meet, and it left me stuck on what to write next and I wrote nothing at all. That writer’s block conundrum will be familiar to writers, but the stopping and overthinking happens in all sorts of areas.

This afternoon, I put on my latest audio book – Lori Gottlieb’s ‘Maybe you should talk to someone’ – and reached a passage about the prisons we put ourselves in. Sometimes, the only person truly stopping us from doing something is ourselves. When we tell ourselves a narrative about other people’s expectations which reinforces our own fear, we’re becoming our own jailers. We need to be bold and brave, and to accept that we need to save ourselves from that mental jail. We do that by taking responsibility to navigate towards our goals the best way we know how – and some of that might involve asking for help from others more expert than ourselves, but we still have to initiate an action. The consequences will include occasions when others judge our failures, but more often the willingness to take risks, make mistakes and learn will be taken as a sign of growth and living life.

So I decide to adopt that fail-fast approach today. The only person stopping me from adding another entry to this blog is me. By doing that, I stop myself continuing to grow and explore my thoughts as a writer, which was the whole point of setting this up. This is therefore a short and sharp entry, pulling the band aid off. Maybe it won’t have the allure of stories about getting hit by a car, but I really don’t want to do that every week anyway! I remain confident it is still a step toward the eventual book or novel and it helps give me direction.

I hope you find things to try this week. Be bold. Fail. Try again.

Thank you for reading.