Five fears of the new entrepreneur.
Practical advice on how to stop overthinking and start doing
The traps the psyche sets on the road to success, and how to deal with the fears: fear of change, fear of improvement, fear of failure, fear of uncertainty.
Anyone can find it hard at times to stay focused on moving forward when fears are looming somewhere in the subconscious.
I was asked to write a short study of the fears and blocks that can arise when someone is about to launch a business.
Our hypothetical future entrepreneur has drawn up a business plan. They understand where the funding will come from and how it will be topped up, they know how to allocate it, what product to make or service to offer, and who they will sell it to and how. They understand what result they want to see and over what time frame — yet somehow they can’t get started. They can’t, because rationally they have worked everything out, but something is holding back the launch. And that something is vague fears or blocks that freeze their enthusiasm and readiness to begin.
In my coaching practice I often come across fears. Sometimes they are out in the open: the client knows exactly what they are afraid of, and we work through it together. Sometimes, though, the fears are unclear to the client — invisible, yet present and pressing down on them, getting in the way and keeping them from moving forward. Then we find them by various roundabout routes. Each of us has our own life experience, which helps us achieve some things and give up others — our own experience of living in reality and within its limits. It can be hard to assess ourselves, the path we have in mind and our expectations on the way to a goal. And if we deny reality, or see it only through the lens of past experience, we can get stuck, lose our way or never even start. That is when we turn to specialists in all sorts of fields. They help us test hypotheses, ground our fantasies and avoid falling into the various traps of the conscious and unconscious mind. A psychoanalytic coach who supports a client in launching or growing a business helps not only to get out of these traps and steer round them, but also to see and work through the aspects the client isn’t aware of.
Fear of change
First, the fear of change. In the near future our hypothetical entrepreneur will have to do something they have no experience of. They will have to change things in their life, change familiar scripts and ways of thinking. And these changes can cause intense anxiety.
How to handle it: ask yourself whether you have felt a similar anxiety before — and if so, when, in what circumstances, and what it might remind you of. If self-observation and self-reflection are hard for you, you can work through this anxiety with a specialist on our platform.
What to do if you find you have a fear of change that is stopping you from launching your business: try to remember what changes you have gone through recently and when, what state you were in at the time, why these changes happened, what it was like for you while they were happening, how you felt once they were over, and what you gained. Behind the fear of change there may be another one — the fear of improvement.
Fear of improvement
The fear of improvement — in other words, the fear of success, wealth or fame. If you launch your business and it becomes so successful that you quickly get rich and famous, and people start inviting you to share your experience and knowledge, what will happen to you? What image comes to mind? Do you like it? Will you drift away from your family, loved ones and friends? Do you see yourself alone on this imaginary business Olympus? If you answered yes to all these questions, you may well have this fear.
How to handle it: start this self-exploration by recalling your most recent achievements. What were they like for you? How much effort did it take to reach the goal — in other words, what did this success cost you? It is important to recall the sensations you had when you felt successful at something. Who shared these feelings with you, and how? Perhaps at such moments you came up against someone’s envy? Or angered or upset someone with your achievements? Perhaps someone important to you devalued your achievements or didn’t even notice them? These may be painful memories for you. Wealth, too, can raise doubts: what do you count as wealth, and why? If you came into wealth, so to speak, what might happen next — in your fantasies, does it warm your heart and delight your eye? Or perhaps you would have to think about how to keep it, protect it or grow it, and for some reason that makes you anxious? And if you became famous — would it please you? Does the image of a well-known businessperson excite you? Are you ready for the flip side of fame — close scrutiny of you and your business — or do you immediately want to “turn the volume down” on it? However you answer these questions, they will help you understand yourself and your motives better and map out the road to your goal.
What to do about it: draw a different picture of your future self — a successful businessperson who knows how to keep a balance between work and family, stays focused on the important strategic aspects of their business and understands why they need it, is ready for possible change and knows how to handle it.
Fear of surpassing
If we look a little deeper, behind the fear of improvement there may be a fear of surpassing someone. Perhaps our hypothetical entrepreneur has a role model, someone to imitate and follow. And this role model drove their dreams in childhood or youth — a kind of symbolic Elon Musk whom it is simply impossible to surpass. From this starting point it is very hard to find the inner motivation to launch such a business.
How to handle it: if you find you are afraid of surpassing a role model, and this is a real public figure, find out from their biography what they were like at the start of their journey. The image may turn out to be more realistic, down to earth and accessible as a source of motivation than it seems to you now. For example, you could read interviews with Evgeny Demin (of the SPLAT brand), in which he describes his path as an entrepreneur, the difficulties along the way and the decisions he and his team made to get through them. Equally interesting is the biography of Tatyana Bakalchuk, who went from schoolteacher and tutor to owner of a major business and, by the end of 2021, was among Russia’s richest women entrepreneurs.
What to do about it: think about what this person or figure you have chosen as an example — the one you will at some point surpass — might say to you. Would they encourage you and support the direction and pace of your business’s growth? Could they, in your picture of them, refrain from scaring you with big risks? Or would they give you some friendly advice? Would they be glad of your success? Working through this fear might mean finding a role model who is proud of your success and your journey, who recommends you and is glad of your achievements.
Fear of failure
The opposite of the fear of success is the fear of failure. It is tied to extremely unpleasant feelings of shame, guilt and helplessness. This fear constrains creative thinking and ties you hand and foot, not letting you even start thinking about launching a business. Here too there are various possible triggers, linked above all to real experiences of failure in the past. Thinking traps can turn into hidden chains of cause and effect that set off this fear. For example, it may be the fear of failing to live up to the expectations of investors or lenders — or of loved ones. It may be the fear of destroying the bright image built up over a lifetime and ending up branded a loser or a fraud. The fear of making a mistake, of going bankrupt, of defeat. It paralyses, constrains, freezes.
How to handle it: allow yourself to make mistakes, however trite that may sound. “Only those who do nothing make no mistakes.” Mistakes in launching a business are part of the journey — the experience that lets you calibrate your decisions, your path and your efforts. If you allow for the possibility of mistakes in business decisions, you are open to correcting them.
What to do about it: recall your noticeable, visible mistakes over the last year, 5 years, 10 and 20 years. How much did they affect the course of your life? The people around you? Where you are now? What conclusions did you draw from these so-called “mistakes”? How did you use this new experience afterwards? Supporting yourself will give you room to understand what matters to you and why you want to launch your business.
Fear of uncertainty
Another fear I work with in my coaching practice is the fear of uncertainty. It is usually a diffuse fear and can be hard to pin down. Here I can suggest a game of answering questions that begin with:
“What if…?”, “What will happen to my business if all my staff quit?” or “What will happen to my business if I can no longer run it (if I get fed up with it all / reach my goal and don’t succeed or, on the contrary, become too successful)?”
While you play this game, try listening to your body and its responses. How does it feel? Fun, genuinely interesting, uplifting? Or boring, irritating, anxious? Perhaps you suddenly want to drop everything. Yet this is only a game in which you imagined possible scenarios and outcomes. And if you ended up with “I’d better not try — there are so many uncertain factors, I’m losing control of my state”, it would be better to turn to a business psychologist or psychodynamic coach for some clarity.
In every case and at every stage, entrepreneurs — established ones and those just getting ready to launch — have different fears sitting at different depths of the psyche. Individual work with a psychoanalytic coach or business psychologist is always effective, and when it comes to a team’s fears, group work with a psychodynamic consultant. That is why I recommend PSY.one, which brings together qualified psychologists with past and present business experience who combine psychological and coaching practice with their experience as employees, team members, business people and managers.
Psychotherapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapy · 7 years in practice
Sessions in person (Moscow) and online; any request. I work with emotional states, with your relationship with yourself and with other people, and with professional and personal growth.
