F – Fear

The fear of looking stupid has haunted us since we were little. There will be a time at some point in everyone’s past when they can remember being embarrassed. Ask your friends on social media when they were last embarrassed and they will be able to regale you with a great story that years later is good for around the table chuckles over drinks but at the time was mortifying. We’ve all got one. But this goes beyond that. The fear of not wanting to look stupid can really damage your success. It can be a defining factor in your career. It can be what separates you from other people in your profession; what rockets their success and railroads yours.

Have you ever:

• Sat in a meeting and thought ‘that slide is wrong’ and said nothing?
• Wanted to ask a question but feared to?
• Spent years in the office with someone you don’t know the name of?
• Struggled with something because you don’t want to ask the person that handles those type of things (they always look so busy!)?
• Been in a meeting and lost the thread of the conversation and been too embarrassed to say anything so just sat there?
• Not made eye contact for fear of being asked to comment?

If any of the above are true for you then there is a good chance that the fear of looking stupid is impacting on you.

The place I see this happening the most impacting on success is when I’m training. People striving for more success have given up their time to work with me and a small group of other like-minded individuals and it’s not until the refreshment break that this person will sidle forward and subtly ask me a question like a secret agent on covert operations. Usually it will be a question that relates to something much earlier in the day. And that impacts on how they’ve interpreted the whole session up until this moment. That is why I tell people: ‘There is no such thing as a stupid question. If you don’t know the answer to something, that is an obstacle to your success.’

Before we tackle that fear, we have to be able to appreciate that it is a fear and what impact it has on success. You can’t fix something until you know it exists, right? Above are a few examples of how that fear can manifest. Can you imagine how it could feel for you? Do you feel confident to step out of your comfort zone and get the answers you need? This is what this chapter looks at: the confidence to override the fear that says ‘I can’t do that; I will look stupid’. If it’s allowed to fester for long enough it can escalate and it can influence the way you think other people see you too. And that is why the next chapter is ‘I can’t stop scrutinising what people think’. They link beautifully together. Although the current chapter can stand alone to really power up success, reading the chapters together gives you a powerful tool kit. So firstly we will work on feeling the internal confidence to act in a way that empowers your self-reliance and overrides the fear to get the answers you need for success. And then in the next chapter we will deal with the way you feel about what other people think about you and the constant barrage of thought that could be impacting on you.

It’s an odd one to fear asking questions. When we were little everything was a question:

• Why is the sky blue?
• Why are mints minty?
• Why is the grass green?
• Why is water wet?
• Why is the night dark?

Endless. We never feared questions as young children. In fact, we relished in the endless questions. It enabled us to form our world. It wasn’t just the questions that were answered that helped us form our world: the person we asked and the amount of time that was given to us helped us feel a certain way too.

As we’ve grown up it changes; we learn that endless questions are considered impolite. People will perceive us in a different way if we constantly ask questions, won’t they? In the work place, once you are over the ‘new’ stage (when a few questions are tolerated and accepted) you are assumed to know everything you need to know. People muddle on through. Thinking things like:

• I didn’t like to trouble them.
• They always look so busy.
• It’s not appropriate to ask for help on that.
• I think everyone else knows how to do that, so its assumed I know too.

And yet unless you take yourself out of your comfort zone, you are agreeing to remain in the dark, trapped in your comfort zone agreeing to an obstacle to success.

Another reason that people fear speaking up and risk looking stupid is because when you are looking to win at work it’s a tough game, right? As someone so eloquently put it to me: ‘It’s war out there.’ Everyone is after the same job. On paper we all look the same, so don’t dare risk showing any sign of weakness. They’d stab you in the back if the opportunity came up. ‘I can’t show any flaw, that would be their opportunity to attack.’ Someone told me that if there are a number of dogs living together and one dog becomes very old and poorly, even though it has been the top dog (the alpha) the strongest dog will fight for supremacy and shove the weak older alpha out. Essentially sending it away to die. I get the idea that many people feel that by risking asking for what you need and risking looking stupid you’re fearful that some alpha is going to come and snap at your heels until you get out of that office and never darken their doorstep ever again!

I know my analogies probably make you say, ‘Don’t be so daft Mandie’; however, in essence, when we don’t ask for what we need, that is what we are doing. We push people on to these evil pedestals where they will be ready to attack at the first sign of weakness. In actual fact in my experience never have I come across so many people prepared to give other people a little bit of their time to mentor, coach and support them to get the results that they want. You just need to have the guts to ask for it. And that is a big ask. It’s a devious, sly, subtle fear that can hide away and just hold you back enough. You know how they say give 110%? Whether you agree that it is possible to give more than 100% or not, the point is that you could be missing out on the winning edge because of this sly fear. In the exercise of this chapter we will look at how to get out of this comfort zone that traps you. Whether you want to carefully creep out or jump so far you can’t see it any more.

E – Examples and exercises

A – Actions

This may feel like a silly fear, and one to skim read. However, I’ve seen this fear physically stop people from taking the actions that could rocket success. So why, when you are on the path to what you want, would you allow anything to stay in your way, however small.

With the actions to take, the big thing to remember about the fear of looking stupid is you have allowed the fear to hide out in your subconscious for years, completely unchallenged. Unless you are a ‘Get so far out of your comfort zone you can’t see it any more’ kind of person (like myself) then it is not going to happen overnight. So here are a few actions to take that will ensure you get the results you want.

• Be respectful of your natural style. If you don’t do big gestures then don’t stroll into the office Monday morning and stand on the table and shout, ‘For the record I don’t even know what a form 7RJ1 is, how to fill it in or what to do with it!’– that is going to do very little to boost your confidence. The right actions will keep you motivated to do more and more. So be respectful of you.
• Accept that sometimes fear can manifest itself as physical things and it’s not to be feared. The first time I publicly spoke at an international speaker and trainer Mark Rhodes event I had to put my notes down on the lectern because I was shaking with nerves so badly! I accepted the reasons why – I was excited to be asked to speak at such a prestigious event so early in my coaching career to my target audience, I wanted to perform well. I’d read that actors and musicians actually see nerves prior to a performance as a good thing. It means that the show matters to them and they want to do their best. I read somewhere: ‘It’s not stage fright it’s performance energy.’ So the physical things you experience when you take on these new things are perfectly normal.
• The more you do it, the better it will get. It won’t always be perfect. However, every time you do this it will get easier. You learn from your action and improve your performance, constantly noticing what worked, what didn’t and what could be improved on.

R – Results

The fear of looking stupid is a tricky one. It can manifest itself as so many other fears and thus not get dealt with effectively. And we can deal with those fears and still leave this one lurking in the background ready to strike or resurface in a new format if you don’t find a way to kick its butt.

I once worked with a client who feared looking stupid if they phoned a repeat customer to ask for more money to do the same contract they’d done for them in the past. Without the renegotiation the client was in effect agreeing to work for a very low figure and it could seriously damage their profit margin, and put the business’s future in jeopardy. (This, however, was something they had only become aware of as we had worked together and so repricing was really their only option, if they were to continue working with this customer. The business needed growth and increased profitability and through the coaching process we had crunched the numbers and discovered the terms were not viable in the long term. However, to ask for more money . . . ?) As much as they appreciated this, it was difficult to comprehend how they could phone this large organisation that they had really valued working with and basically say, ‘We want more, a lot more money to do what we have already done for you’. It had been an amazing coup for this company to get the job in the first place: how could they risk rocking the boat? This was professional suicide! ‘This could ruin our reputation in the industry!’ ‘We could look very foolish!’ Helping them to see what they were agreeing to was not enough. However, I made it personal. Because I had worked with this client over a few months, we had already worked out the company’s long-term goals and I knew the business owner’s values and I knew the hot buttons and fears that they had. I had worked with this director and knew their core values; what drove them to success. The conversation went a little like this:

‘So basically you are like a supermodel?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ They asked in horror and disdain, because I knew that this kind of shallowness would not sit comfortably with them. This person was an incredibly professional, corporate business owner who ‘didn’t suffer fools lightly’ and I knew this kind of superficial profession of the fashion world was the furthest removed from my client that you could possibly imagine – remember to get out of a comfort zone, sometimes you have to feel the uncomfortableness of the environment you are in.

‘A supermodel.’ I expanded. ‘Someone that doesn’t even get out of bed for anything less than £7,000 a day. Which is, in essence, what we are saying. You won’t negotiate, because it’s below you. It’s beneath you.’

‘That is not what we are saying at all!’ They argued immediately. Seeing the sarcasm that I was giving them.

‘Okay, so what are you saying?’ They sat back in their chair, squirmed and gave me a knowing ‘Oh-Mandie’s-got-me-sussed look’ and said, ‘Fine I will call them.’

You see how feeling stupid can hide out on your pathway to success? Don’t let it. What is great news with the Director in this story is that with the right coaching I know that they renegotiated with that company a far better contract that was more profitable for them, with fewer hours, so they were freer for more opportunities too. They really proved they could win at work.

I’d like to close this chapter with two statements that could be good to remember to enable you to practise the exercises and take the action to get the results, and they are:

• People like honesty.
• If you don’t ask, you don’t get.