The Fear of Failure and How to Overcome It
When locked in the grip of fear we simply don’t do our best work!
There are dozens of fears, and all of us must learn to deal with or conquer them. And by conquering them we actually join the ranks of Heroes! You may think my hero analogy an exaggeration, but not so, here’s why.
My definition of a hero is someone that had the courage to act in the face of fear.
Look, everyone has fears even heroes. The guy that risks his own life to pulls his wounded comrade to safety while under heavy enemy fire had as much fear as anyone else, but he didn’t let it stop him from taking action. He found something within to take control of his fear and do something that mattered.
Sure, some fears are a good thing. If for example, you’re hiking in the woods or some unknown back street in New York City and come face to face with a Saber-Toothed Tiger your survival fear kicks in and our fears instill you with enough common sense to resist the urge to blow up a paper sack and pop it just to see its reaction!
So survival fears are good for keeping us safe. But when we let our survival mode fears override our business decisions then it’s our fears that actually threaten our survival.
Let’s talk about the fear that most often present barriers to our success.
The Fear of Failure-In the society we live in, the word “fail” is the mother of all four-letter words. There is a tremendous amount of pressure we put on ourselves to succeed. After all successful people are winners aren’t they? And now one wants to be looked at as a loser.
So to avoid being looked at as a loser some will do just about anything, including not getting involved, not trying, avoiding any activity that we could fail at. Some people won’t even participate in sports because they can’t deal with the idea of losing.
And the real danger in this is that our reactions are often subconscious, so completely rationalize our fear as a “logical” course of action. We may not even be consciously aware that we are letting our fear of failure get in the way of making decisions we otherwise want to make.
For example, let’s say you want to make more money. You come across a course for making money with online investing from home. You even have a friend who is successfully doing it. But when you start looking at all the details, like the costs, the risk, the time involved learning about it; you automatically find every “logical” reason under the sun not to even give it a try.
Even if you have the money to buy the course you find some reason to pass on it because it doesn’t deliver the value you’re looking for, even though you have the time you find some reason you can’t rearrange your schedule to sacrifice your gym time or Blockbuster movie night. Even though you are as smart as the next guy you decide it’s too complicated to learn. Even though you know you can limit your risk with stop loss orders you find some reason like the Enron scandal to justify your not even giving it a try. Etc. etc. etc…
Anything to avoid failure.
Is avoiding failure the best way to achieve success?
Tom Peters, the management guru, suggests we develop a passion for failure! Why? Have there been any great leaps forward without blunders and failures along the way? He calls for perpetual revolution not change, anarchists not change agents, action, action, action, the pursuit of embarrassing failures.
It may come as a surprise to hear that truly successful people not only have failed, but also are good at failing. Studies have found that we may have been lucky if we were forced to fail. One might even say that a key to success is learning to fail well.
You see, failure is not a permanent thing. There isn’t a single Super Bowl Championship team that hasn’t failed before they got that ring!
Just because they lost doesn’t mean they quit trying. Many people consider themselves failures when in reality all they have done is quit trying.
So what are you afraid of? A little self-analysis is in order here. You already understand that it’s certain you won’t succeed if you never try.
When you feel pressured or full of anxiety understand that it’s the fear of failure that hurts us far more than actually failing. It’s really the fear of not knowing what’s going to happen that’s the worst thing. We can usually deal with the worst if we know what’s coming even though we may not like it. Not knowing is what creates anxiety and vacillation.
Also at the heart of our fear of failure are some universal fears.
A. Not being accepted by others. We think if we fail others won’t accept us. Actually that’s your own paradigm, because for the most part, people are accepting and even supportive of others when they aren’t doing well.
On the other side of the spectrum when you think about trying something new and actually succeeding it broadens your sphere of acceptance because it opens new doors to meeting new people that you now have something in common with.
B. Another fear centers on the need to be unique in some way — a need to be better than others. Listen all you super achievers, it’s extremely unlikely that any one person can be better than all the other 6 billion people in the world in anything.
If we think we have to be better than somebody else, rather than just being the best we can, we are doomed to be a constant failure until the day we die.
And you may want to think about this… in sports, reaching the top is an exhilarating experience, but every world record holder is doomed to have their record broken by someone else, it’s only a matter of time before someone comes along that is better.
C. Other common fears in this category include the fear of losing or of being beaten by the guy in the next office or the next sales call, the fear of being rejected, the fear of being controlled or hemmed in. There are many others, of course, each as potent to those who feel them as the next.
Beating the Fear of Failure
Psychologists advise us that talking to someone about our fears and then use our imagination is one of the best ways to conquer them. First, by talking with someone it’s a natural release valve. Second, by using our imaginations to focus on the benefits or positive outcomes of what will happen when we succeed instead of our fear of the “what if I fail”, we can relieve a lot of the anxiety.
Reducing the pressure requires that we break the mental set that "success is equal to right and therefore equal to good, while failure is equal to wrong and, as such, is bad." We have to learn to accept failure as a normal healthy part of life. Remember, there isn’t a successful person on the planet that hasn’t failed, and if we can learn to bend rather than break under the pressure of failure, we are much better off.
Terry Bragg, author of 31 Days to High Self Esteem and Peacemakers Training consultant, suggests these 6 steps for overcoming our fear of failure.
Step One: Take action. Bold, decisive action. Do something scary. Fear of failure immobilizes you. To overcome this fear, you must act. When you act, act boldly.
Action gives you the power to change the circumstances or the situation. You must overcome the inertia by doing something. Dr. Robert Schuller asks, "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?" What could you achieve? Be brave and just do it. If it doesn’t work out the way you want, then do something else. But DO SOMETHING NOW.
Step Two: Persist. Successful people just don’t give up. They keep trying different approaches to achieving their outcomes until they finally get the results they want. Unsuccessful people try one thing that doesn’t work and then give up. Often people give up when they are on the threshold of succeeding.
Step Three: Don’t take failure personally. Failure is about behavior, outcomes, and results. Failure is not a personality characteristic. Although what you do may not give you the result you wanted, it doesn’t mean you are a failure. Because you made a mistake, doesn’t mean that you are a failure.
Step Four: Do things differently. If what you are doing isn’t working, do something else. There is an old saying, "if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got." If you’re not getting the results you want, then you must do something different. Most people stop doing anything at all, and this guarantees they won’t be successful.
Step Five: Don’t be so hard on yourself. Hey, if nothing else, you know what doesn’t work. Failure is a judgment or evaluation of behavior. Look at failure as an event or a happening, not as a person.
Step Six: Treat the experience as an opportunity to learn. Think of failure as a learning experience. What did you learn from the experience that will help you in the future? How can you use the experience to improve yourself or your situation? Ask yourself these questions:
(1) What was the mistake?
(2) Why did it happen?
(3) How could it have been prevented?
(4) How can I do better next time?
Then use what you learned from the experience to do things differently so you get different results next time. Learn from the experience or ignore it.
Step Seven: Look for possible opportunities that result from the experience. Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, says "every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or a greater benefit." Look for the opportunity and the benefit.
Step Eight: Fail forward fast. Tom Peters, the management guru, says that in today’s business world, companies must fail forward fast. What he means is that the way we learn is by making mistakes. So if we want to learn at a faster pace, we must make mistakes at a faster pace. The key is that you must learn from the mistakes so you make so you don’t repeat them.
Last but not least is never give up. It’s the ability to get up one more time than we get knocked down that is the sign of a true winner.
It’s your time to become a Hero. You have power over fear, it can no longer prevent you from achieving your dreams. Just do it.