“Fear can be good when you're walking past an alley at night or when you need to check the locks on your doors before you go to bed, but it's not good when you have a goal and you're fearful of obstacles. We often get trapped by our fears, but anyone who has had success has failed before.” Queen Latifah.

What she’s talking about is the fear of failure - the fear that stops you from pursuing your goals. It is the concern that if you attempt something and fail, it would be devastating.

It is important to get in touch with your fears so that you can overcome your fears. Or you may find that when you move towards something you want, you get a physiological experience and you talk yourself out of it. You remain stuck in the same old cycle.

With courage, you can look at and overcome your fears, and thereby be empowered to achieve anything you want in your life - whether you want to grow your business or bring in more clients as a business development professional; or to provide a fully engaged culture in a transformational leadership role or simply to get a new job on a new career path.

Here’s how to access courage.

• Identify what failures you are afraid of and jot them down on the left side of a page. What are some of the top things that you think might happen if you were to fail. What is the worst that could happen if you were to fail?

• On the right hand side of the page, for each fear you have listed, write down something you can do, someone you can count on for support or a different way of looking at it.

o For example – you might have a fear that if you try to engage in a conversation with a person who has authority over your position, you could put your job at risk – on the other hand, if you speak up, you might be able to generate an appropriate conversation that makes a difference. You could also recognize that your job is always at risk and you should have a resume and a strong network ready to connect with at all times.

• As you break down your fears, you will be able to see how you can step up and focus on your goals with a new sense of courage and a renewed confidence.

I am going to borrow from T. Har Eker’s “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind”. He said that poor people think that their problems are bigger than they are, while rich people consider themselves bigger than their problems. I include challenges when I use the word problems.

I invite you to consider yourself bigger, more capable, more resourceful, and more creative than you previously thought of yourself. I think of you as infinitely creative and resourceful. You are someone who comes up with new ideas all the time, and you have people to reach out for their support, and they know people, too. When you consider yourself to be bigger than your biggest challenge, you overcome any fear and achieve anything you want.

Yes, sometimes you will still have to muster up the emotional state called courage to deal with that feeling in your chest. However, every time you do spomethig bold, whether you accomplish a desired outcome successfully or if you fall short of your target, you will have a new experience from which you have learned and that builds confidence and experience. That confidence and experience will thereby require less effort to must up courage on your next try. And if you keep trying, you can’t fail.

How about you? What’s a big juicy goal you have and the challenge that you are facing that if you face it with courage you’ll gain experience and/or create victories worth celebrating?