I Want To Be A Money Making Mom, But I’m Scared

As I have mentioned a few times, I was chosen to be on the launch team for The Money-Making Mom by Crystal Paine, so I received a copy of the ebook a few weeks early.  I dove right in, expecting to be inspired and hoping to find some concrete and specific advice for what I can do to make money from home.  We are trying to get out of debt, after all.

Crystal walks you through the steps of figuring out what to do and how to do it.  By focusing on your own unique skills, talents, passions, and knowledge, you can come up with a way that you can make an income from home.  This part of the book, which was one of the first chapters, really resonated with me, and I immediately sat down to make a list of all the different ideas I had for making money from home, regardless of how realistic they were.  I filled an entire page with possibilities.

And then, I stopped.

I stopped reading the book.  I let my list get buried in a stack on the desk.  Because I’m scared.

On that list of possibilities, there is a high likelihood that, even if I tried every single one, most of them will end in failure.  When people ask me what my deepest fear is, I tell them “deep water”, because I can’t swim and I am scared of water, but that’s a lie.

My deepest fear is actually failure.  Not measuring up.  And the impossible standards I’m not measuring up to?  Those were created by me.

“However, contrary to what I thought in the beginning, I’ve come to realize that failure is my friend.  I’ve learned much more through failure than I have through success.”  Failure is going to be present in my life.  I can either be scared of it, or keep going in spite of it, and maybe even learn something from it.

I’m trying to wrap my mind around the idea that if I try something, the worst that could happen is that I fail, and that’s okay.  It’s not the end of the world.  My self worth, my value as a person, is not contingent on whether or not I can make every single thing I do a success.  I am still me, even if I fail.  When I fail.

This seems like such a simple concept, but it’s something I have struggled with as long as I can remember.  I have always been striving for perfection.  And maybe it hasn’t helped that a lot of times? I achieve what I set out to do.  Straight As in school? Check.  College scholarship? Check.  Married to a great guy, with adorable, (fairly) well-behaved children?  Check and check.  So I think that makes the times where I don’t immediately make progress that much more difficult, because it’s not what I expect of myself.

I don’t know which of my ideas I’m going to try first.  I don’t know how it’s going to go.  But I’m going to start something.  I’m going to try.  And I may fail…but I’m hoping that this time, I’ll use it as a stepping stone to learn what to do next, instead of seeing it as the end.