Conquer Your Fears: Don't Be a 'Prisoner of Hope'

Fear can make us act so illogically. The resulting behavior can turn even the most stout entrepreneur into a prisoner of hope, when we replace accountability and self-reliance with a false reality and a deflection of one’s responsibility. I learned that firsthand in a somewhat unconventional way.

To help me maintain a balanced and healthy lifestyle, I made the decision to undergo hormone therapy; it requires me to have an injection once a week. Usually, my wife, Shemi, gives me my injection, but one time she was away in Miami, and I needed a shot. For the first time, I had to give one to myself. Just like all prisoners of hope, I displayed all the classic symptoms, from denial to shifting the responsibility from me to others. I created an elaborate scheme to avoid the inevitable.

In the morning as I prepared the injection in my bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror as I held the needle. I was gripped by fear. “There is no way I can do this,” I told myself. It wasn't the pain that I feared. I talked myself into believing it was too difficult because of the angle; I convinced myself that it was nearly impossible for me to reach around and stick the needle into my butt. I needed someone else to help me so they could take a more direct approach.

Immediately I began searching for someone who could give me the shot. I called my neighbor, a nurse, and her husband, a doctor. Neither was home or reachable by mobile phone. I thought about going to a local hospital emergency room or the local drugstore where they give flu shots. One of my former employees was a nursing student; I could get her to do it. She could get some valuable training, and I could avoid sticking myself with that piece of surgical steel.

Any and all of these solutions seemed the best possible answer to my problem. Yet the problem was not the angle—it was me. Instead of facing the reality of my situation, I was concocting a fantasy scenario to solve my problem. The solution was actually the guy I had looked at in the mirror.

I went back to the bathroom chiding myself, “Am I a man or a coward?” Clearly at this point a coward, but I knew I had to face the inevitable. Staring at the injection site, I rubbed my target with the alcohol swab, raised the needle, and began the downward motion toward my right cheek, but I stopped just as it approached my skin. I lost my nerve, so I left the bathroom disgusted with myself.

Prisoners of Hope Passively "Hope" for Solutions

Being a prisoner of hope creates a paralysis that can hinder your efforts to move your entrepreneurial dreams forward. Whether out of fear of making a mistake, risk avoidance, emotional attachment, or laziness, the entrepreneur who is a prisoner of hope is frozen in a false reality that the solution to his problem is found somewhere other than within himself. Prisoner passively hope for a solution, when reality dictates we should proactively create our solutions. As leaders and pursuers of our dreams, it is our responsibility to provide the answers.

As entrepreneurs, when we become prisoners of hope, we look for others to solve our problems, just as I was looking to others to solve my injection problem. But the responsibility is ours. We must accept the responsibility of self-reliance—counting on ourselves rather than on others—to find solutions.

Deflecting responsibility doesn’t solve problems; it simply provides us with a temporary rationalization and moment in a false reality. The problem still exists and can only progressively weaken our organization’s foundation.

My problem could not be “hoped” away, and what I needed to do was proactively seek out a solution because all the excuses I could come up with failed to help me accomplish my goal. When we make the commitment to be entrepreneurs, and therefore leaders, we must gather the courage to solve problems in spite of our obvious fears.

Leaders Take Full Responsibility

During my entrepreneurial career I faced plenty of situations that called for decisive action, and I, like many other entrepreneurs, was fearful of the tasks before me. Only through the realization that hoping for a solution does nothing but allow a problem to fester and destroy did I come to actively pursue appropriate answers.

But it had to be me who willfully accepted this responsibility. I am the leader and that is what leadership is all about, taking full responsibility–for the good and the unpleasant.

Filled with self-pity yet realizing that this problem needed a solution, I looked to my one true friend who I lean on in desperate times: the refrigerator. Sitting in one of the drawers was some unexpected inspiration. I remembered how diabetics learned to give themselves injections by practicing on oranges. So I grabbed an orange, dug an old needle out of the sharps container, and began jabbing it into the orange. “Oh my, this is easy,” I said to myself after practicing for thirty minutes.

Filled with a new enthusiasm and self-confidence, I marched triumphantly back to the bathroom, took a breath, and ping, I gave myself the shot. I didn’t feel a thing. After wasting half a day trying to figure a way out of it, in two seconds it was done. Free at last! Or, as the poet Robert Frost put it succinctly, “Freedom lies in being bold.”