“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
– Henry Ford
Fear is one of the biggest reasons we aren’t extinct. It has kept us safe even past the dinosaurs. But anxiety can be good or bad for you depending on how you react to it. Your mindset determines whether fear of failure brings out the best in you or puts a limit on your potential.
If the thought of wasting all your time, energy, & effort makes you work harder it can absolutely help you grow. However, if appearing incompetent is how you interpret failure then it ends up significantly crippling what you can achieve in life.
Our mind is one of the most powerful tools we have to carve out a life we desire. Successful people aren’t flukes of nature or super humans who can make cities appear out of thin air. But they have one super power & it is the right attitude.
Exploring what they have & can learn rather than getting stuck in a victim mentality. Tuning our attitude takes effort, but if it was easy then everyone would be insanely successful, right?
We all have the right attitude – the desire to learn, grow, & find solutions. Otherwise, how could we have learnt to walk, talk, read & do the rest of it? It just needs a good dusting & a dash of belief.
Why you have fear of failure:
Your subconscious brain wants to keep you safe. That’s why we didn’t end up getting trampled off Earth by mammoths or eaten to extinction by dinosaurs. Familiar is safe for our lizard brain – that part of our brain which doesn’t much value logic.
When not being successful means proving our abilities aren’t enough, we aren’t smart enough, or looking like a fool – we develop a fear of failure. It keeps us stuck in the safe but same old place. Your brain is just trying to keep you safe because change comes with risks. That’s why doing something new requires a lot of motivation.
“Life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!”
– Alfred Adler
Related:
Live Your Dream: Why It’s Important for You & Never Too Late
Signs of fear of failure:
- Getting stuck in the planning stage, tweaking & trying to make it perfect resulting in procrastinating repeatedly. We come up with 100 different reasons why it might not be a very good idea to start now.
- Perfectionism sometimes can be due to fear of failure. It can be good or bad depending on whether it’s being driven by the desire to give your best or by the fear of messing up & ending up looking ignorant. In fact, perfectionists can develop atychiphobia (a persistent fear of failing).
- When we start believing that not being successful at something is going to mark us as a loser. When we turn the action of failing into an adjective defining our worth.
- Needing constant outside validation for the decisions we take.
- Sometimes a situation can overwhelm us so much that we start feeling we have lost a grip over it & so we just want to run away. If this is caused by
how the situation is going to end & not by how it’s playing out, thenit’s because of fear of failure.
Related:
Low Self-esteem: How to be absolutely more positive and not take things personally
How to overcome fear of failure & motivate yourself:
1. Dig deep:
The first step to overcoming any fear is to get to the root of it. What is it you fear would be the result? Why do you believe it’s a possibility that’s going to happen? Is it something you were conditioned to believe in from childhood? Did a personal experience left you believing it’s the natural outcome of what you are going to do?
For example, if you grew up hearing that you weren’t the athletic type, it would make it harder to add running to your exercise schedule. You might feel why to make so much effort when it’s bound to turn too hard to continue with. Here, the mind turns predisposed to expect failure & the root cause is the belief that you weren’t athletic at one point in your life.
Fear is a survival technique & your subconscious mind will use creative tricks to keep you safe. But if you explore the root of your fears, it becomes easier to get rid of the irrational & limiting ones.
Related:
Low Self-esteem: How to be absolutely more positive and not take things personally
2. Let go of what you can’t control:
When you fear that you might fail at something, just focus on giving your best. That is what’s in your control. You can’t control the outcome, so let go of it. Because if you don’t take the shot you’re going to miss it 100%. Your chance at success is better with risking failure than inaction due to fear.
Failure happens. It isn’t permanent. Go through the emotions but don’t stay wallowing in them. Learn from your missed attempts at success & keep moving with a better strategy in place.
Related:
Emotional Resilience – How to Stay Strong and Not Stress Out
3. Be mindful of your self-talk:
One of my biggest fear was making a fool of myself & being laughed at behind my back. I told myself that even if I felt I did a good job, other people might not think so. This kind of thought, no doubt turned out to be very counterproductive.
Most of the time what we fear other people will think actually mirrors what we secretly fear about ourselves, part of our self-talk. I was tempted to turn ‘if you don’t try, you can’t fail’ into my life motto because that was familiar & safe. A love for comfort zone is one of the biggest reasons for developing fear of failure.
If things didn’t go as you expected before, it’s natural to be wary of it the next time. But if you give in to this emotion, it becomes a limiting belief that keeps pulling you back.
Find examples of people who have failed, persevered, & went on to make their dreams a reality. It’ll show you that other outcomes are possible even if it didn’t work out initially. This is very good for motivation to keep persevering . Show yourself a bit more love, be compassionate in how you interpret your actions, & work on your limiting beliefs.
Related:
How to Use the Power of Positive Thinking – Overcome Limiting Beliefs
4. Your mindset matters, work on it:
Your mindset is one of the most powerful tools you have to make the best of everything that comes your way. When you start looking at failure as an event & not a part of who you are, you become emotionally mature. Failure & self-worth are two very different things.
Challenges, risks, failure, & success are all part of change. It’s comfortable to stay within your tested limits & scary to try something new. But change is one of the cornerstones of a life worth living.
Look at setbacks & missed attempts as something to learn from & grow. Take your lessons learned & move on. Failures don’t show your level of smartness but highlight the limitations of your strategy. Fix them & try again. That’s how every success story looks in the beginning. Ask JK Rowling!
Related:
Change your mindset: How to positively redefine your life
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
– Ken Robinson
5. Positive mindset:
When you look at a thing in it full context, it makes better sense, right? As hard as it might be to go over the failed attempt, explore it to find where things went wrong.
Having a positive mindset isn’t about focusing on the rosy things & blocking everything else out as if they never existed. Instead, find the loopholes in what happened & choose to focus on finding a way to fix them. Don’t let setbacks turn into off-limit signposts.
To face your fear of failure in any area, ask yourself how would your life look if you didn’t have that fear? What can you learn even if you fail? What would you do? If those actions are in line with your values, then the outcome doesn’t matter. Because simply having courage to take the right action is success in itself.
Related:
Declutter your life: How to effectively spring clean your mind
The right mindset is
Get to the base of your fears when you find second-guessing your capacity & moving forward becomes tough. Believe in your ability to learn, grow, & find solutions. Simply put, choose to focus on the positives & keep moving forward.
Fear is a strategy to keep us safe & alive, not to stunt the quality of our life. Don’t let being scared define the limits of your success.
Which fear is holding you back & how would your life look different without it? Let’s continue this discussion in the comments section below.
Follow my blog with Bloglovin