A young woman came to me feeling overwhelmed and scared to move forward in her business.  She had recently closed one business and was feeling like a failure and having issues moving forward in her new career and business.

Through coaching and the integration of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) we were able to deal with the feeling of overwhelm which allowed us to get to the core of her issue, which was fear of failure.  By setting her goals for the future she bumped up against her fear of starting over.  By working through what the feeling and beliefs were, she discovered that as a small child she was taught that “if you don’t do something right the first time then don’t do it at all”.  So she has held herself to this high standard, which was actually halting her from reaching her goals. It also caused high stress, sleepless night and anxiety. If she thought she wasn’t going to succeed then why even try.  This belief was really counterintuitive, as she will never know what she can succeed at until she actually fails. The other belief that surfaced during this time was that she was letting her parents down that they would see her as less.  We tapped through these beliefs and she realized that her parents don’t see her has a failure and that she isn’t disappointing them.

Failure, as most of us have been taught, is a bad thing, no one wants to fail; it means, finished, done, its over, makes us feel stupid, not good enough, we give up.  Thomas Edison knew it to be something quite different as he said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”.   What if failure was a mindset that was used as a tool to show us where growth needs to happen, it’s like giving us clues on how to improve.  

By challenging this client’s long held belief and changing her mindset she was able to see the lessons that failure provided and be grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow with the knowledge that failure offered.  By releasing the fear of failure and being a disappointment she was able to move forward in her career and start her business with less stress, anxiety and was able to sleep better.