Fear and Entrepreneurship: The Psychology of What Scares Us

Your stomach ties itself into a knot and your heart races nowhere as your mind sorts through every conceivable worst case scenario.

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We call it “fear” and our instincts scream for us to avoid whatever source it stems from.

But as irrational as it often is, as silly as it sometimes seems when you witness it in others, fear is something we have to continually confront throughout our lives.

Entrepreneurs especially—so steeped in uncertainty as they are—have to learn how to live with fear if they want to go far.

Because perhaps the scariest thing about fear is how it tricks us into denying ourselves the things we most want.

by Braveen Kumar You may read the entire article HERE on Shopify website

Understanding Fear

For many neuroscientists, “fear” refers to the physiological state of a particular neural circuit in the amygdala that decides how we respond to threats.

The way we experience fear, however, is a negative emotional response to perceived danger that affects us both physically (rapid heart rate and breathing) and mentally (expecting a potential undesirable outcome).

Physiologically, the fear of public speaking could feel very similar to the fear of getting hit by a car. Fear is supposed to serve to protect us from harm and preserve our well-being.

When it’s not actually protecting us, however, fear can be an obstacle. In a recent survey of our readers, fear was second only to marketing knowledge when we asked what almost got in the way of getting that first successful sale.

I was kind of scared to launch; [I] didn’t know if my website was lame or not.
Anonymous Store Owner

The 5 Types of Fear

“Fear” is just the word we use to capture a feeling that can vary greatly in intensity, duration, and irrationality that can be triggered by any number of things.

So in order to understand it, it might help to group fear as we commonly know it into 5 categories described by Dr. Karl Albrecht in his book Practical Intelligence: