There are two types of fear when it comes to the creative process: healthy and unhealthy.
Yes, there’s a healthy fear. This is the fear that you’ll lose some money or crash and burn your company or organization. This type of healthy fear helps you avoid obvious mistakes and very dumb risks. And there are plenty of obvious mistakes and very dumb risks you need to avoid. That fear helps you. Just don’t let it keep you from every single risk. It’s important to risk. But a healthy dose of this fear is good for you to keep you from disaster.
But the unhealthy and toxic fear is being afraid that people will reject you because of your art. We fear people will finally see us as frauds. We fear people will see our true selves and realize they don’t like us anymore. We fear people will make fun of us. But as artists, we have to kill this fear.
It’s impossible to manage how people think about you. We can’t control that. The only thing we can control is what we do. And if you have a vision and a passion, you have to do it. You have to follow that spark inside you regardless of the consequences.
But let me clue you in to a little secret. No one’s going to reject you. Nobody’s going to reject you because we’re all the same inside. We’re all afraid. We’re all insecure. We all have the same fear and we’re all desperate to escape the fear.
Nobody has time to reject you because they’re too afraid of their own rejection.
So risk. Kill fear and risk.