#BlogOEmotion Day 2: What are you afraid of?

What are you afraid to face? (Photo credit)

What are you scared of? Cockroaches? Strangers? Darkness? Losing a loved one? Failure? We all have different rational and irrational fears. But what is it that we constantly live under the shadow of? Just think of what we teach our kids. We want them to do well, win competitions and work harder than the others. We celebrate success and disapprove of failures. We laud the A's and don't want to talk about the C's. As kids grow up, we teach them to aspire for the best universities, the most coveted jobs and a lifestyle that people can be envious of.

When I look around on social media - which is such an important part of our lives now - there are loud voices talking about individual accomplishment. We almost don't want to admit that we failed at anything. People will judge us and we will fall short in their estimate. There are quotes, memes, tweets all over the place about how we will reach success someday.

We only glorify failure and call it the stepping stone to success. We talk about failures of great people only to prove to ourselves that despite failure, it's their success that counts. And with some others, we don't even mention their failures since their success is a beacon of shining hope for the rest of us. For instance, we all know what a great inventor and presenter Steve Jobs was. But no one ever talks about him being thrown out of his own company at the beginning of his career.

We all constantly live under the shadow of failure. We all want to look back on our lives and be able to count the number of achievements off our fingers. We want to leave some legacy for our kids and have them aspire to better that. We, as a society, do not celebrate failures. We don't believe that it's ok to fail and admit it. We are not perfect and shit happens.

Don't fear failure. Keep going! (photo credit)

When I look back at my goals from 2 years ago when I started my training blog and company called Soft Skills Studio, I set out to establish it as a full fledged training and coaching outfit. Have I accomplished that yet? No. But do I bring that to people's notice? No. Instead I do a lot of other things that will eventually make the company a success. But does that mean I am a failure? No. I have achieved many other sub goals along the way. There is no specific benchmarks to measure success or failure. No one's completely one or the other. We have some things going well for us while some other balls might still be up in the air. So instead of fearing failure, we just need to accept that some things might not work but that doesn't mean we failed. Even if we did, there is nothing wrong in accepting it, picking ourselves up and get going along the way. In fact, the very fear adds to the pressure and may not work in out favour.

What do you think about the fear of failure? Are you plagued by it or are you able to take it in your stride and live one day at a time? Drop your thoughts in the comments and let's keep the conversation going.

This post has been written for #CreativeCurves under #BlogOEmotion week. Today is Day 2 and the prompt is fear.