How To Overcome The Fear of Being A Leader

Are you afraid of being in a leadership role? Do you feel you’re not good enough or that you don’t have what it takes?

Many people feel like they’re not cut out for a leadership role because they’re afraid of making mistakes or being judged by their peers. It’s something that many people struggle with, especially with their career. That fear of leadership is real, but it doesn’t have to control your life.

By the end of this article, you will understand how to overcome that fear and finally become the leader you were meant to be.

1. Recognizing Weaknesses

The initial step in defeating leadership fear is recognizing one’s main concerns and weaknesses. If you want to be a great leader you should always strive to understand your weaknesses and strengths as this helps in understanding the specific areas that should be addressed if one is to overcome leadership anxiety.

For example, if you realize that the main issue is speaking in public, you may decide to take a public speaking course to overcome the fear in other words.

2. Let your goals guide you

Channelling the small and realistic objectives towards achieving your ultimate goal will always help in overcoming fear towards any form of failure. It needs courage and strong personality to embrace the culture of success. Consequently, it takes some quality time to lay and fulfil a real strategy; therefore, being easier to propel success. By reframing your goals, you can open an opportunity for new ideologies and learn new concepts, which might be helpful in the growth and development of your career.

3. Fail

What? Yes, that’s right… You should be pushing yourself above/beyond the fear of failing. If you’re not pushing yourself enough so that you encounter failure every once in a while you’re probably not pushing yourself hard enough.

4. Always work with ambitious people

People around you will always determine your well-being so, making it clear that for one to succeed, you should be active and ready to work for the best. It is true that the manner at which you handle people next to you will reveal the frequency and package of success. But if you coordinate and work with smart people then failure will be minimal, and success will prevail.

5. Be ready to handle criticism

If there is one thing the world will never run out of, then its critics. And to be honest, there is always going to be someone who will criticize you no matter what you do, you cannot please all the people all the time, and some of those people just love to speak out.

Leaders often have to do things differently, you cannot change the status quo by just doing the same things, and there will always be people who will disagree with your approach and the things that you do.

You cannot let this fear of criticism stop you from doing what you believe needs to be done. You need to learn and understand the difference between constructive criticism where people are genuinely supportive but are challenging the merits of the approach, which may be valid, and those who are just criticizing from jealousy or because of their own fear of change.

6. Take risks

When we land a leadership position one of our first goals is to try and retain it, not to make any mistakes or not to make things worse than they are.

The challenge here is that leadership is not about maintaining the status quo, leadership is about improving things, delivering results, taking things to the next level and that is always going to involve taking risks. This doesn’t mean be reckless, as that would be crazy, but it does mean that you should look to take smart risks, or look for ways to mitigate the risk of failure.

Conclusively,

Being a leader is hard, there are lots of challenges and obstacles that you have to overcome, and these seven fears if you can master them and find ways to overcome them, then this will help you on your journey to achieving your full leadership goals.

If you need help or support on your leadership journey, then sign up for this Strategic Leadership Course and unlock your full leadership potential!