By Patti Fletcher, VIP Contributor for Entrepreneur.com
People with entrepreneurial mindsets cannot help but see the impossible solution at the next possible supernova. We laser-focus on differentiated innovation, often losing hours and friends in the process. We also sometimes lose our mojo and the ability to cope with the anxiety entrepreneurs often feel during times of failure and stagnation. While some forms of anxiety require the help of medical professionals, entrepreneurs can learn to enjoy and even benefit from flops or even catastrophic attempts at innovation by knowing which levers to pull to change how they view and experience failure.
Related: Neuroscience Tells Us How to Hack Our Brains for Success
Get to know your neurons.
Our brains contain 1 billion neurons that ignite each of our five senses. Neurons learn from the past to create the present. Someone with entrepreneurial tendencies, you will have tried something new several times in your life. Sometimes, those new things work out well and sometimes they do not. In either case, the experience leaves a footprint of positive, negative or indifference that get transmitted and translated as fact by your neurons. Every time you enter a similar experience, your neurons send signal to your brain of what to feel based on previous experiences and mounting, resulting perceptions.
As you enter into a potentially anxiety-inducing experience, learn to preemptively orchestrate a new conversation in your head. You are not the victim of your neurons. You can control what your neurons signal to your brain. Be willing to question your fears as well as your sources of inspiration. Neurons create habits. Your job is to test your repetitive reactions, get rid of habitual feelings that no longer serve you and replace them with ones that do.
