You wake up one lazy Saturday morning and decide you are going to do something productive. The sun is splitting the sky and you are keen to sort out the mess that is the back garden. As you walk around the garden you start thinking about the work ahead of you and come to the realization that this isn’t a one weekend job, even the clean-up alone will take the best part of the day. Will I put it off till next week? Runs through your mind. All of a sudden your mind is racing with all the obstacles that are in your way, before you know it you are back on the couch with the laptop doing some work or just surfing the web. All the positive energy you had in the morning, has just ebbed away. The ideas for the rockery have been put on the top shelf and marked with “I’ll do that another time”. The top shelf is now a mess and buckling under the weight of all the ideas stored on it

Ideas are like the seeds you planned to sow, if they’re planted and carefully cultivated then the seed will turn into a plant, much like how our ideas and thoughts can be turned into something real and tangible, with the right nourishment. When we look at a seed it doesn’t look like much, but it has the potential to grow into something. Our ideas are similar. Some of them look and feel pretty much like other peoples so we toss them away. Look how different all the flowers in a garden can be, yet all came from seeds that look fairly similar. I wouldn’t know one packet of seeds from another, but I can tell the difference between the flowers. You need to learn to give the idea the legs it deserves and if it doesn’t work out then you can move onto the next one.

Starting out in anything can feel a little bit like the above. Instead of looking for the positives in the idea we tend to move towards why it won’t work out. The fear of failure almost acts as a cushion for the inaction that we create. Fear of failure is like a weed in the garden. Its can strangle everything else around it and can take hold pretty quickly, removing it is a much longer process. Once it takes root if can have such a negative effect that we start to undermine own efforts to be successful. Inevitably we will all experience failure at some point in our lives, it’s how we deal with this failure that really counts

However there are ways that we can reduce the fear of failure or even help with blocking out the notion of failure in our minds. It’s easy to say that we will think more positively but we need to ensure that we have a plan in place to help with this. The plan needs to cover all the scenarios that might arise. We need to look our idea from every angle possible, be ready with a Plan B at hand if our worst fears come to fruition. To just say “I tried my best” isn’t good enough. We need to exhaust every avenue possible. This is where goal setting comes in. A long term goal needs to be broken up into smaller easily achievable goals, completing these small accomplishments goes a long way to re enforcing positive thoughts for your desired outcomes. Keep plugging away with small steps even the best laid plans in the world start with the smaller details