Fight fear with an experimental mindset

- [Female] This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. - [Instructor] I want to know as a counselor, what are the sorts of needs be they stress, imposter syndrome, whatever that you see pop up most often amongst you ambitious professionals? - [Counselor] Yeah, I love that question because I think even ambitious professionals still have their own hangups and there's a lot of common ones we see. I think one of them is definitely that fear of failure. Especially when you're an ambitious person you want to rock it out and be awesome all the time, and that can actually stand in the way of your success. I tend to look at things and try to help my clients look at things as experiments, where you're going to experiment with something see if it works, see what sticks, and then if it doesn't work, move on to the next thing. Don't see it as a failure, see it as a learning experience. And so what happens then is people stop getting paralyzed by perfection and they actually start getting things done in their job and in their roles, and they can take those risks because is not so much about pass fail, like, did I actually achieve this, as much as I'm going to learn a lot whether or not I pass or fail this. And through that process, I'm going to become better at my job and better in my role. - [Instructor] Oh, that is a fantastic reframe right there. So, so well put, I mean, coming from experience there in terms of fear of failure is there. But if you just think about it like an experiment, then there is no failure. It's just sort of like, okay, now we know something. - [Counselor] Yeah. And I think that if you think about our traditional education system, if you go to college or even if you went to just to high school like you're supposed to write a paper and draft and polish it and then turn in this final draft when you think it's about as good as it can be. Unless you, you know, slacked and you know, did it the night before. But most people when they take their education seriously, it is pass fail. You get one shot at it, but that's really not how the business world is anymore. That's not how most jobs are where you're learning on the job, you're growing on the job, you're hopefully pushing yourself to develop skills that your peers maybe aren't looking to develop. And through that, you start to stand out more and more over time.