It’s not the absence of fear or doubt, but the confidence of being able to deal with whatever comes that sets successful people, the go-getters apart from those who give up before reaching the end. And that’s why it’s a life skill to learn how to stop being afraid of failure, how to stop what-might-happen stop us from finding what’s possible… what if things DO work out.
5 Keys to stop being afraid of failure
If you never fail, you’re only trying things that are too easy and playing far below your level… If you can’t remember any time in the last six months when you failed, you aren’t trying to do difficult enough things.
– Eliezer Yudkowsky (co-founder of Machine Intelligence Research Institute, California)
1. Shift your focus
When we see failure as a coded message to tell us what we need to bridge the gap between where we are and where we want to be, it becomes more of an enabler than something holding us back.
It’s about appreciating the effort instead of focusing on the conclusions we draw from any failure.
All the what-might-happen scenarios, the dangers our mind can imagine triggers the sympathetic response in our body – the fight, flight, freeze response. If you’ve ever heard scary campfire stories or watched a violent movie you would know how real this feels.
And when we keep practicing taking failures or mistakes as pitstops on our learning curve, distancing failure from the idea that it’s harmful for our survival, we connect it more to the parasympathetic response…. the calm response. Essentially, we stop being afraid of failure.
2. When it's connected to others
Sometimes, the idea of disappointing those whom we value makes us afraid of failure, and sometimes it’s more about what would people think of us, the embarrassment of not being up to par.
- To tone down the stress and anxiety of something we are dreading, use cognitive reframing – challenging and replacing automatic negative thoughts with more helpful and rational ones. Like, “Just because I’ve had trouble speaking in front of a large group, doesn’t mean it will happen again.”
- To stop being afraid of failure because of how it might look, it helps to ask which one means more to us – the satisfaction of accomplishing the task or avoiding the temporary discomfort of things may-be not working out right, asking whether it would really be as bad as we are imagining it may be right now.
3. Being afraid of failure due to uncertainty
Another reason for being afraid of failure is uncertainty when trying to do anything new, something we haven’t done before.
To stop letting this dictate our attitude and energy of approaching anything, we increase the odds of certainty. Instead of hoping things won’t go wrong, we build confidence through plans for if and when things go wrong.
Having to deal with uncertainty means we are trying to do something new, something more than we usually do because we are not okay with stagnation, not okay with missing out on life. And fear is something that’s only diminished by taking action and facing it.
For 2 more things that triggers fear of failure and how to overcome them, watch the video up top.
