Tricking Fears into Guidance

We don’t like fear. It feels bad. So most people decide to avoid it. Often we don’t even realize it. But I discovered that fear can be a friend and not an enemy.

We were a team of around 10 people in my first internship of analytics. We were helping different departments of our startup. And in startups sometimes you do things outside of your main responsibilities. This time I had to find potential business partners and discuss with them some technical details about the integration between our systems. I wrote many emails, but got only a few replies. So I sent a second email. Nobody else replied. Someone came to me and said: “Hey, you should call them”. I was like: “yeah, right”. I was very afraid of ​​talking to strangers over the phone. Even calling to an internet store about my own order caused paralysis.

I ended up never calling a single person during that internship.

But I understood that I have this problem. So when I had to choose my next company, this was a decisive criteria for me. Another one was that it should be an international company, I will share more about it later. To overcome this fear I decided to choose a job that would require me to talk a lot over the phone and to conduct negotiations.

In my first working week I had to call 100+ potential suppliers. Though even this was not enough to set me free from this fear. It took another year and a half and several very urgent situations and tough negotiations before I stopped thinking about it. Focusing on solving the business problems more than on someone else’s opinion helped. As you can imagine, this skill impacted my career a lot. In all my following positions and till today.

This is how knowing about my fear helped me to choose the direction. Since then, I use fear as guidance a lot. If I am afraid of something — most likely this is exactly what I should do.