Does the thought of failing make you work harder or does it make you think twice about doing it? Knowing this is important because though fear is essentially meant to do us good… keep us safe and surviving, it can also hold us back from going after the things we want more of in our life. So, let’s look into which strategies work best when, to overcome the fear of failure. But to make that work optimally, we need to be aware of a couple of things, sort of lay the right foundation. So, let’s get them in place quickly first.
How to overcome the fear of failure
Everything our brain does is aimed at making us survive longer. And even though the things that stress us every day won’t usually kill us on their own, our brain is stuck at a stone age level of evolution and feels if we are stressed about something, it’s a threat to our survival. So, it starts catastrophizing – churning out all the worst-case scenarios. And this gradually makes us afraid of failure.
1. Fear of failure helping or harming you?
If it is doing us good –
One way this can make us act is we start putting in more effort just to avoid failing. And that usually means better chances of success, right? Like, the fear of failing in exams makes us study harder.
Sure, we get better grades as a result. But, the bigger outcome is that we gain more knowledge. Like, can you imagine the quality of healthcare we would get if doctors were simply taken through the training with a degree at the end without having to pass any exams? Yeah, it does start to make sense if you think about it like that, doesn’t it?
We start to understand how a fear of failure becomes good in that sense. And if it’s helping us get better results in whatever we do, then why would we want to overcome it?
When it holds us back –
But when it starts to overwhelm us, hold us back from going after what we really want, that’s when we need to stop and find a way out.
The fear of failure can be because of many different consequences we would rather avoid. And that’s why every strategy won’t work as well for every situation.
So, it becomes really important to know what specifically are we trying to avoid.
2. Find the specific reason
We react to and try to cope with that fear differently depending on the reason. We might wish to avoid embarrassment, shame, disappointing someone, or just uncertainty. And anyways, it’s easier to find a solution when you know the cause, right?
Researchers on fear of failure have identified several negative consequences people with a fear of failure expect, including feelings of shame and embarrassment, a big-blow to self-esteem, the prospect of an uncertain future, the loss of social influence, and disappointing important others.
– Psychology Today
So, broadly speaking, there are usually 2 main reasons –
Catastrophizing (part of survival mechanism) –
This can be sneaky and tough to notice because sometimes it works at a subconscious level. We would be procrastinating on something or becoming overly perfectionist about something without even realizing that we are just trying to avoid reaching the end. At some level we feel it’s going to be something we won’t really like.
Catastrophizing causes us to lose confidence in our capabilities and ability to handle any situation. And so failure seems more likely than it is really.
Learnt fear (part of sociocultural conditioning) –
Fear is something that we kind of learn through sociocultural conditioning – the things we learn while growing up which help us survive as individuals and as a part of society.
When learning to walk or talk we never knew to be afraid of feeling embarrassed, falling and failing over and over again. But, somewhere along the way to becoming adolescents and grown-ups, we pick up on the idea that failing undermines our standing in a social setting. It shows something lacking in us and so needs to be avoided at all costs. We start to hold back because if we fail, what would it show about us?
But the silver lining in this is that, as fear of failure and rejection is a learnt behavior, so it is obviously something that can also be unlearnt. And that becomes the key to finding the right strategy.
3. Choose your strategy
As we know by now, there are 4 main type of things that we wish to avoid when we are holding back because of a fear of failure.
1. Letting people down (partly learnt fear) –
If it’s because we feel what we have to offer is probably not enough, we are not this enough or that enough…and may be also we don’t want to let those people down who matter to us, disappoint them… then it helps to do these 2 things.
- Slow things down. stop all the thoughts popping and rushing in your head focus on what you can control. Check how prepared you are. When we focus on this, there is very little mental bandwidth left to focus on the things we are afraid of. The network of neurons in our brain cannot actively process two different things at the same time.
- Have a plan. Confidence is all about feeling prepared and in control of any situation. Have a plan for how you will deal with the scariest outcomes, keeping of course your focus on the things you can control. If you need to, break things down into smaller manageable chunks and change whatever you feel is not working for you.
2. Lot to lose personally (partly catastrophizing) –
Another big reason is we fear we are at risk of losing a lot personally. If things don’t work out the way we want, we might end up with considerable wasted time, effort, and resources. What helps overcome the fear of failure here is to –
- Remember your why. why are you working on this in the first place? Will it in any way, directly on indirectly, help you be where you want to be in say 5 or 10 years from now?
And if it will, then ask yourself which one would you regret most – not even trying or bearing a bit of loss?
For which strategy to use for the other two types of fear of failure, watch the video up top. One of them underlies all these reasons.
Meet you there.
