Creative Ideas: Defeat Your Dreadblock and Release Your Fear of Failure
Oct 02, 2018
You’ve likely been haunted by this phantom before, who obscures himself in Fear Gas, his favourite weapon. If you give him the chance, this dreadful creative monster and his gas will smother the saplings of your ideas, before they can begin to flourish.
The Dreadblock
Bio: Dreadblock is the phantom that we don’t always see, yet we can feel his heavy presence setting in. This phantom lives in the beginning of an idea, slowly appearing in his cloud of Fear Gas, choking our impetus to get something started for fear that we may not succeed. Dreadblock will release his Fear Gas at every opportunity, particularly when we are stimulated by a deep admiration of someone else’s success.
Symptoms: Self-doubt, negative self-talk. Dreadblock likes to take our admiration of others and use it against us. He stops us in our tracks of a new idea, whispering things like “I could never do that”, or, “I wouldn’t be as good as them”. As soon as we begin to doubt ourselves, there we find Dreadblock with his gas at the ready.
Antidote: It’s a little known fact that Dreadblock can be conquered if we simply continue to breathe through the cloud of Fear Gas. Once the phantom realises that Fear Gas won’t stop our creative process, he tends to become a bit more shy, and appears less and less frequently as he realises his chance of success wanes (even Dreadblock suffers from fear of failure). To get over our fear of failure, we have to disengage from the expectation of the end result. This means not worrying about what something will look like in the end, but enjoying the process more instead. One of our favorite ways to reduce ‘result expectation’ is through what we’ve lovingly dubbed Peekfree Doodles. Give it a go!
Quote: “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.” – J.K. Rowling, Novelist / Screenwriter
