Snakes or Failure...Neither please!

My two biggest fears are snakes and failure, and have been for a very long time haha. Certainly I have very different reactions when faced with the presence of either, but both surely do produce a real sense of anxiety. My fear of failure is something that I guess you can say I've "struggled" with for awhile now. It got to a point where it was negatively affecting my life in the middle years of high school. I was a top student and athlete in my school and had never really experienced a true sense of personal failure before, and so I became very anxious all the time. I feel like it was two-fold; to one regard I was afraid of what people's reaction to my own failure would be, while at the same time I was nervous as to what failure meant, it represented the unknown, something that I did not have much experience with. Eventually through my experiences and by talking with friends and family I was able to mitigate this fear to a degree, so that it helped me to stay motivated and work hard without the negative repercussions of constant anxiety and fear.

Just as I have experienced in my own life, an unchecked fear of failure can seriously impede a writer. Anxiety and a hesitancy to show passion in writing can be very easily recognized by any reader, and so in this way a writer's fear can be directly manifested in their writings. Even this is taking for granted that a writer was able to overcome such fear and write anything at all. It is unlikely that as consultants we will face such an enormous fear of failure in the contexts of writing, but even minor fears can have real negative effects. It is our job to put the writer at ease and make it known that it really is normal for such anxieties to exist.

Personal anecdotes and strategies seem to me, to be the most effective way in which to create this atmosphere of understanding and openness. After all, its not an act; each and everyone of us have struggled to write a paper at one point or another, many have probably feared to pursue a point in an argument that differs greatly from the professor's views. It is crucial to use our own experiences in order to assist the writers that we consult; these writers are our peers, if we don't understand what they are going through, then who will.