Break Your Study Fears

Nothing should stand between you and achieving your goals in 2015!
For many of us this reflects both a wish and a dream. We get stuck in
the same annual ritual of starting work on or about the 5^th
of January and doing the same for the next year. It is time to pursue
your dreams and awaken your potential.

What is going to make your 2015
different?

To really make your year different you need to break out of the
negative spiral of emotions and blockages that is trapping you behind
your desk and go into the world and start looking at your life in a new
way. This is exactly what serious study is about. It is about
growing yourself from your current life to a new life in which you are
the master of your destiny and you break the fears that is limiting you
from achieving your potential. We believe that you have a genius inside
of you that is waiting to unleash itself and our programmes focus on
enhancing not only your intellectual capability but also your spiritual,
emotional, financial and general life potential.

For many people – fear is so consuming that when failure is an option
– they will not try it at all. In this process we typically undermine
our own actions and create the inevitable failure that we feared in the
first place. We often fail to start something – just because we think it
will be hard. Fear immobilises us and stops us from progressing in
life.

Many people are scared of studying. It is well documented that there
is study anxiety and we come up with road-blocks in our own journey. The
main fears that we come across daily includes

• Will I have time for studying?

• Will I have the money for studying?

• Will I cope with the material?

• Is this the right time in my career?

• I am scared of exams and assessments.

There are ways to solve all of these issues and they have a tendency
to work out. Every year, millions of people go through the same process
and they are fine. You need to have a plan but for each of these the
good news is that if you start this journey it is the first part in the
process of changing your abilities forever.

When we look below the surface of these issues that potential
students face, there are often fears of being judged, a fear of failure
and an inherent desire to be successful but a self-limiting belief that
I cannot be successful. You can be successful! You have the right and
the potential to be successful and nothing should stand in your way to
achieving your potential, today!

We all have different definitions of success and failure, simply
because we all have different benchmarks, values, and belief systems. A
failure to one person might simply be a great learning experience for
someone else. Success to one person may be perceived as a waste of time
in the eyes of others. The condition of fear becomes debilitating when
we allow that fear to stop us doing the things that can move us forward
to achieve our goals.

Signs of Fear of Failure

You may say that you are not afraid – but you need to look deeply and
ask what is stopping you from starting to study today.

You might experience some of these symptoms if you have a fear of
failure:

• A reluctance to try new things or get involved in challenging
  projects.

• Self-sabotage that we can often express as procrastination,
  excessive anxiety, or a failure to follow through with goals.

• Low self-esteem or self-confidence through commonly using
  negative statements such as “Those people are so much smarter than me”,
  “I’ll never be good enough to get that promotion,” or “I’m not smart
  enough to get on that team.”

• Perfectionism – A willingness to try only those things that you
  know you’ll finish perfectly and successfully.

• Being overly cautious and insisting on understanding the
  consequences before taking any action, to the point of doing
  nothing.

• Constantly changing what you expect – saying one thing today and
  another thing tomorrow – because you do not know what you really
  want.

It’s almost impossible to go through life without experiencing some
kind of fear or failure. People who do so live so cautiously that they
systematically limit themselves in terms of what they can achieve and
one day live with many regrets of what could have and should have
been.

Change the game!

The wonderful thing about fear and our destiny is that it’s entirely
up to us to decide how to look at it.

You can choose to look at fear and failure as the start of an amazing
learning experience. You need to ask what the lesson is that you need to
take from this experience and also interrogate what you need to
change.

If you can take out a clear view of what you can do right now to
change your situation, you have not only conquered your fear but you are
in fact on your way to a great victory.

This process often starts with gratitude and looking at what we have
and being willing to ask for the lesson we’re meant to learn, with the
openness to learn them. This learning process is what makes education
the powerful experience that it is. We can challenge ourselves in a
constructive environment and learn from others and accelerate the
process of achievement of our dreams.

Fear stops us only if we let it. Success only enters when we seek for
it.

Decide to study today

1. Imagine what it would be like if you studied and succeeded. What
   is the best thing that could happen as a result of your success? If you
   tried it and it was a fantastic, resounding success, what is the best
   thing you could imagine happening?

2. Ask yourself what you would try if you knew you couldn’t fail?
   What are you not now doing that you would try if you had a magic wand
   and you knew that you were absolutely assured that you would
   succeed.

3. Find our more. Take the first step and speak to someone around
   what it will take to study. Learn from others that are not in your
   normal circles and share experiences and fears to break through to new
   areas.

4. Look at what you think the roadblocks are and start talking to
   people around how to overcome them.

5. Face your fears and find a way to laugh at yourself.

6. Knowing what you would try if you could not fail, ask yourself
   what would be the consequences if you tried it and failed? What is the
   worst thing that could happen? If you tried it, and you failed
   miserably, what is the worst thing you could imagine happening?

7. Ask yourself if the potential for success is worth the risking
   the possibility of failure?

8. Step out and take a no-excuses approach.

9. Embrace your fear – but realise that it may be irrational and do
   it anyway.

10. Realise that you may be in a comfort zone but that you need to
    push through it to get to the other side.

11. Make a decision and stick to it.

12. Say YES to the opportunities that are in front of you.

Many times people do not act because they are irrationally afraid of
the possibility of failing – even though the success would give them
tremendous rewards. If realistically the worst consequences of failure
aren’t all that horrible and if rationally the likelihood of failing is
quite low, reconsider your fear. The first step may be the hardest but
it is time for you to live up to your full potential.