For most of us, the start-up phase of our business involved a lot of fear.

Speaking for myself, I was terrified that I couldn’t make a living. That every client that hired me would be the last. Or someone would figure out that I was making this whole thing up as I went.

That makes sense. I was making it up as I went, and I had no consistent process or practice that led to new clients. Those were some legitimate fears!

But as my business matured, the imprint of those fears hung around a lot longer than they needed to.

• I would take on work that didn’t fit my niche out of fear that I couldn’t land a better client. However, working in a new niche involves too much risk and extra work.
• I’d delay a key hire, expecting business to drop off (even when it steadily grew). This meant I worked long nights to make up for the missing capacity.
• When my bank balance went down, I panicked and ran around looking for new work (instead of collecting past-due receivables and forecasting future work).

How has that fear of failure impacted you and how you run your business?

What would it look like to let go of that fear of failure and work from a place of confidence in your abilities and the team and processes you’ve built?

That fear was helpful when we made mistakes right and left in the early days. But how about now? Is it still serving you?

Where do you need to take more risk? What’s keeping you from trying something that might fail?

When we try to hold still, the world moves past us. Trying to stay safe can be one of the riskiest moves you can make.