The fear of failure is the fear of the "what if?" that stops so many people who want to get started investing in real estate. When you're looking to get started investing in real estate, there are a LOT of very real and very potentially disastrous "what if?" questions that will quite literally spring into your mind (or be planted there by people around you, the media, or those who do not share your vision or enthusiasm).

What if you paid too much? What if your credit is ruined? What if you can't resell the property after you buy it? What if you the repairs and rehab costs are more than you can afford? What if someone gets hurt in the house or on the sidewalk and you get sued? What if you get foreclosed on because you can't make the mortgage payment?

What if a drunk driver's car barrels into the living room of your rental house the very day your bank was destroyed in a fire before they released the funds on the check you paid your homeowner's insurance premium with?

Believe me, once you start going along the "what if?" route, there's no telling where or how unlikely the places your imagination will take you- or how much the fear of failure can get you in its grips.

But fear of failure in investing is so much more than just "what if?".

In the end, though the only thing that matters is prudent preparation.

The best way to eliminate the fear of failure is to ANSWER ALL THOSE WHAT IF QUESTIONS!

Planning is the key here. If scenario A happens, you perform action B.

Take action and plan it out. It's as simple as that.

You can't know all of the various (and many, very unlikely) things that can go wrong with a real estate investment (like the drunk driver, rental house, bank fire, non-paid insurance scenario above), and if you did you might never invest.

But you can plan for the likely scenarios, and know exactly how you'll react in each of those eventualities.

So do it. Put the pen to paper and determine what are the likely problems and how can I put plans in place to solve them before I invest?

Even putting the fear of failure behind you with prudent preparation, though, is not enough sometimes.

Another common fear is the fear of success.

Many people suffer with striving for success because they feel undeserving of achieving that success. Lots of time this is not a conscious thought-process but one that goes on beneath the surface on a subconscious level.

Something in our past makes us feel non-deserving. It could be a humble upbringing. It could be an overbearing father. It could be an early failure.

It could be an embarrassing situation. Whatever it is, there's something there we have allowed to define ourselves so much so that we have a fear of success.

We've allowed whatever it is to define ourselves as "not good enough".

And since we as human beings almost always act in a manner that is consistent with the image we see of ourselves (our self-concept), instead of taking the actions to achieve success many times we can self-sabotage ourselves and act more in line with the belief that we are not good enough, that we aren't deserving of success.

If you want to make a success of real estate investing, you have to stop that!

Just understand this. Each and every single one of us has had struggles and trials in our past experiences. We've all made mistakes. We've all been taken advantage of. We've all tried things and not gotten the successful results we wanted. We've all been embarrassed. We've all felt that we weren't good enough for something.

We need to realize is that what's past is past. Fear of success does not serve us or our goals.

Let it go.

To read part III of this article and see what can happen in your life when you release the fear of the unknown in your investing, look for the last article in this series titled the same.