The Fear of Being Wrong – Understanding your Irrational Behavior

The fear of being wrong, or more accurately, the fear of being called wrong is one of the most debilitating emotional drivers that we all face as we seek to address change in our lives, it is evident across all decision making choices and is enforced by peer groups in order to control social structure.  Understanding this fear, and where it impacts you will be the single most important discovery you can make towards finding your financial freedom, and living the life you dream of.

Atychiphobia (from the Greek phóbos, meaning “fear” or “morbid fear” and atyches meaning “unfortunate”) is the term given to this notion, and whilst it might seem on the surface that this only affects a certain minority of people, I would argue that we all suffer from this, on a scale, and addressing it will set us free.

The fear of being wrong manifests itself at change points in your life.  Whenever you consider breaking a habit, or adding something new and unknown to your life you feel this risk, uncertainty, doubt. What if it’s wrong?  The truth of the matter though, is that right now you do need to make changes to your life to improve it, but at the same time the brain does a great job of convincing itself that things aren’t that bad, and you settle for the mundane, or justify bad practices in order to avoid the conflict of change.

Change is a battle against Social Acceptance

To move from a routine and habit that has become ingrained is difficult because you have created a comfort zone where people accept you for what you are, you have friends and loved ones that like you in your current position, should you threaten to change something critical about your life, such as breaking free of debt, or going back to college, or starting your own business – you threaten the status quo of the relationship.   You change the dynamic of your relationships when you do this, you risk losing your friends.  This is because we humans operate in a Pack mentality and when you shuffle to hierarchy there are conflicts.  You will find friends battling against your desire to change, directly or indirectly in order to maintain pack position.

You have to break away from the Pack

This is most powerful, and most intimidating when you have gone through life for some time in a stationary place.  By this I mean when you make excuses for not achieving your goals, things like ‘i’ll save later’ or ‘i’ll do this once I have the time’.  Once you accept that the only time is now, you will realize you need to break away from the pack to achieve change, and being alone is scary. The fear of being called wrong is evident here, when you leave your old network of friends behind, they are waiting for your failure to occur, sitting below a ladder looking up at you with spears in their hands, waiting for you to fall and punishing you for trying.  Because how could you dare address the problems in your life and leave them behind.

I believe that this concept of the old pack waiting for your failure, and your fear of this, is the key behind every bad decision we continue to make.

Drinking

Drinking is an excellent stall tactic for change.  Drinking too much, knowing it is bad for you, but you don’t stop because if you do you then you have to start looking at your life, drinking to ‘unwind’ meaning you don’t want to face the challenges and problems at home, so you hide behind alcohol, stalling the need to face the battle to change.

Drinking can be social, with many of you in the same group, the pack again, quitting would lose that group of people around you, they would want you to drink again, hope you failed at quitting drinking and want you back with them, despite its negative affects on you.   Once you are back in the fold and drinking again with them you are back to pack position and they are your buddies again.  When you are back in position they feel comfortable about not changing their position, but when you change position, you are forcing change on them too.

Debt

Debt is another huge area for the fear of being wrong, when you are in debt, due to which certain aspects of life are outside of your grasp, so you use credit cards or frequent flyer miles to achieve a quality of life you feel you deserve, but this is a thin veneer.

At the foundation you don’t have enough money saved for retirement, are paying loans and credit card interest and are barely staying afloat.  You interact with people who are in a similar place, some of them are appearing to live the same life as you, but have their finances under control.  Here it will be the people who are in debt that are your pack, they will keep highlighting the wonderful things they are doing with their lives and travel, all the while hating you for focusing on fixing your financial situation.  They will hope you stop, and start to ignore the problems you face and cover them with short term pleasures.  This is the rat race.  You need to break free.

Bad Investments

You hold stocks in losing companies, you bought them thinking that you knew best, but really it seems that they are slowly losing value, and there is no clear turnaround in sight.  You hold onto these stocks because there is a chance that they will hit the Jackpot and become a 10x winner, you risk beyond your means, borrowing money to dollar cost average your position down so that when it hits it will payoff towards the amounts you first dreamed of.  Unfortunately, when it doesn’t you are left in debt.  This irrational fear of being wrong, when you are actually already wrong is very common in investors.

Your Job

You don’t risk quitting your job and becoming self employed, pursuing your dreams.  If you try that and fail then all of your co-workers will be hoping you fail, and laughing at your attempt to better yourself, the shame of coming back to the pack, tail between your legs and listening to their comments about your failure stop you from trying.  The fear of being called wrong is bigger than the fear of accepting your life is sad, and you could try to do so much more with it.

There are people around you don’t want you to succeed, because in doing so you are demonstrating that you understand the fear of being wrong, and accept it.  Look that fear square in the eye and say ‘bring it on’ because you know, that real failure isn’t from being wrong, it is from never trying to be right.

What areas can you change, and what are too scary to address?  The ones listed above are all things I have faced, and some I continue to face myself.  I have learnt now, that every time I am comfortable, I start feeling uncomfortable, and that way I keep pushing myself to improve.