This is a much-needed topic for discussion among photographers.
We're all familiar with the fear of failure. Our oldest, from an evolutionary standpoint, the 'reptilian' brain, serves one of the main purposes: to keep us safe. When we're attempting something new or find ourselves in an unfamiliar environment, there may be risks and threats to our safety. Hence, our inner instinct aims to keep us in our 'comfort zone' so we don’t get into trouble. This is natural and normal. The risk of failure includes not only the common threat 'Something bad will happen to me…', but also many other factors such as feeling guilty, feeling like you've let someone down, feeling insecure, judged, and the list goes on. In the case of us photographers, what we often hear is 'I won’t win the competition', 'I'm just an amateur, so why try something new? I haven’t even mastered this genre. I'll fail at the other one!', 'If I share a photo and no one likes it, I'm a failure!'. This is understandable.
