The perfect diet

Overcoming the Fear of Failure in your dieting.

One of the biggest hindrances to productivity and success is fear. Whether the issue is weight loss, learning a new skill, making a career move or any number of other activities, we are most paralyzed by fear of failure. But failure is part of our lives; it is not going to go away. The best way to deal with a fear of failure is to change our mindset about it, so that we can move beyond inactivity and start making great things happen in our lives. Failure can be viewed as the end, or viewed as a lesson to help you in improving future actions.

Change your mindset. There is a sure way to avoid failure, and that is to never attempt anything. But never attempting anything is not success either; in fact, it is to barely exist at all. Anyone who takes action and pursues anything is going to fail, but successful people see their failure as steps in the learning process.

Consider Thomas Edison. It is said that it took him over 10,000 attempts before he successfully created the light bulb. But those 10,000 attempts were not failures in his mindset. He said, “I have not failed at each attempt; rather I’ve succeeded at discovering another way not to invent an electric lamp.”

Combating fear of failure demands that you expect failure to show up at some point, because there is no way to avoid it. This does not mean that you do not also expect success. It simply means that you dive in with the full understanding that most successes have a track record of bumps and stumbles. The truly successful person realizes that she may fall, but when she falls she will get right back up again, take stock of what she has learned and then move forward again.

Use the following strategy to tackle your fear of failure and start making some epic changes in your life:

• Visualize the failure. So what if you do fail? What will that look like? How will you react? What will your next move be? Considering the worst case scenario and how you will deal with it helps you make friends with the possibility of failure and takes away the uncertainty. Recognizing and embracing the possibility of failure diffuses its power to paralyze you. When you have a plan, the road looks much safer.
• Start. The first step is the hardest, but after you take that first action step, you will have momentum that will keep propelling you forward. What is the first thing you need to do to start the process of your venture? Do you need to make a phone call? Write a to-do list? Write a business proposal? Pick the first, small action you need to take and just do it.

Success seldom comes without failure. Embrace it, look it in the face and go forward from here.

Getting over failures and moving forward –

• What is past is all said and done. What remains to be seen is what I can bring to my present and future.
• Better for me to concentrate on what I’m doing today rather than on what I did or didn’t do before. What I do today will shape my tomorrows. The past isn’t going to get any better!
• Poor decisions made in the past do not have to be repeated in the present.
• Because something once happened doesn’t mean that it has to continue to happen.
• No matter how bad any event was, I do not have to allow it to continue to have a negative influence on my life. I cannot rewrite history and change what has already happened.
• Feeling sorry for myself, angry toward others, guilty, or ashamed for getting the short end of the stick in the past will only continue to keep me from achieving happiness in the present and future.
• What I tell myself today is much more important than what others have told me in the past.
• My experiences do not represent me. Rather, they represent things I have experienced; they do not make me into a better or worse person and do not determine my future success.

Failure is inevitable. How you view your failures will make the difference between success and frustration.