FEAR: What’s holding you back?

I always like to keep up with recruiting tends, new processes, or anything that will further my knowledge and/or change my way of thinking within this ever-changing industry. One of the recurring themes that keeps appearing, is how much fear plays an enormous roll in furthering our business, career, personal goals, etc.

When I first started out in my recruiting career, I was so nervous to engage with hiring managers or even senior-level recruiters. Having hardly any experience at all, I felt that they would look at me as an inexperienced, fresh-out-of-college kid that didn’t know what I was talking about. Looking back, I probably missed out of some placements or possibly building relationships with hiring managers. Why? To put it into one simple word; FEAR. Fear that these more senior folks would look down on me because of my experience level.

One of my current reads is by Christy Wright, author of “Business Boutique” she says “It can be terrifying. But when you do it anyway, something amazing, beautiful and extraordinary awaits you on the other side of your fear.” She also goes on to quote about Dr. James Pitzer Gills II who said:

“I’ve learned to talk to myself rather than listen to myself. When I listen to myself, all I hear is fear, doubt, lies, and failure. But when I talk to myself, I can tell myself anything I want to. I can feed myself good thoughts of hope, confidence, truth, and victory. I can tell myself I can do it. When I learned to talk to myself rather than listen to myself, I realized that there was nothing I couldn’t do.”

Fear is full of “IF”. You say to yourself “IF I do this and fail, people will look down on me or I will make a horrible mistake”…..IF, IF, IF…

For those that are just starting out in their careers, up to C-level executives running a company, everyone has some sort of fear. We let fear paralyze us from moving forward until things are perfect before pushing out an email, proposal, letter, etc. DON’T WAIT! You don’t have to be perfect to add value or to accomplish a task set in-front of you to meet a goal. Suzy Kassem says, “Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will.” Don’t kill your own dreams. Don’t limit yourself to being comfortable with how things are. Grow, look past the fear and you will see that remarkable things will come from it. You will gain experience, knowledge, wisdom, pride and the list goes one. Alex Goldfayn says in his book “The Revenue Growth Habit” that, “Without action there are only unfulfilled planes and dreams.” He goes on to say, “There is fear, procrastination, perfection, but there is no peace of mind, accomplishment, or resulting joy.”

I challenge you today, no matter where you are in your career or what your life-goal is, find the fear and get past it. Talk to yourself and tell yourself you can do it! We’ve all heard that “No one is perfect, we are only human.” How true is that? A piece of advice I like to give recruiters starting out in their careers is to not have a fear like I did in speaking with hiring managers or senior level folks. We are all human and have the same end-goal. Don’t let this fear limit you on gaining experience and learning from your mistakes.

I will leave you with this quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”

Now, go be a conqueror of your fears!

Mandy Vitto is the Senior Internal Recruiter at NSS RPO, a consulting firm that provides on-site and virtual recruiting professionals. Contact NSS RPO to learn about how we can help your organization meet and exceed it’s hiring goals.