Overcoming the Fear of Failure

Sometimes the fear of failure can be immobilizing.  It can hamper the best laid out plans and send even the best of the best tumbling down.  You may have experienced this personally.  How many times have you walked away from a really good opportunity because you were afraid to fail?  The trick is to overcome the fear of failure and move forward towards your goals.  The following paragraphs are set in place to help you do that.

Overcoming the Fear of Failure Starts with Recognizing the Cause

The causes of the fear of failure varies.  This is because what might be a failure to one person is often considered to be nothing more than a learning experience to another person.  The fear of failure is not isolated within one group or another.  At some point and time we all have feared that we might fail yet we go ahead with our plans any way.  The fear of failure that we are addressing in this article is the fear that keeps a person from progressing in life.

The type of fear of failure that can hinder you from doing what it takes to reach your goals can stem from many different places.  Maybe when you were a youngster you had parents that were overly critical of everything that you did.  These negative feelings are often carried into adulthood.  Fear of failure could also stem from some traumatizing event that you had earlier in life.  For instance, maybe you gave a presentation in front of a large group of people and you did very poorly.  This type of trauma can cause you to fear trying other things.

Overcoming the Fear of Failure by Recognizing the Signs

There are signs that reveal that you have a fear of failure. 

One sign of the fear of failure is that you are reluctant to take on challenging projects or to try new things.  Another sign of the fear of failure is self-sabotage.   This sign includes the neglect of following through with goals, experiencing a lot of anxiety and procrastination.  A third sign would be a lack of self-confidence or low self-esteem.  This is evidenced by negative self-talk for example “I’ll never be good enough to make the team.”  A fourth sign would be perfectionism.  Doing only those things that you know you will have great success at.

Overcoming the Fear of Failure by Realizing it’s a Perspective

Life was not made in a way that we can go through it without experiencing some sort of failure.  The one thing that we do have control over, however,  is how we perceive failure.  We can look at failure as the ‘all to end all’ or we can look at failure as an incredible chance to learn.  Every time we fail at something we are given the chance to learn how to do something better.  There is a surprising amount of superstars that have experienced great failures, did not give up and have made a success out of their lives.  See my post Famous Failures Who Didn't Quit.  Michael Jordan is one of the stars mentioned in that post.  Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.  Imagine if he had quit his dream of becoming a basketball player.

Life is full of dips, curves and surprises making it easy to fall.  People will reject us and we might even make bad decisions.  When these things happen just think of stars like Michael Jordan and all of the chances that you yourself might miss out on if you quit when you fail.

It really is how you look at it.  You can see failure as the end of the world or as a chance to learn, grow and do better.

Steps to Overcoming the Fear of Failure

Overcoming the fear of failure can be done.  The following are a series of steps that will help you to see failure in a healthier light and to embrace life more fully.

Embrace Your Errors

Don’t be so hard on yourself.  The last thing that you want to do when you fail at something is to be down on yourself.  Don’t beat yourself up when you fail at something.

The most successful people don’t see failure as the end of the world they see it as a place to learn from.

Evaluate Possible Results

The fear of the unknown is one reason people fear failure.  Make this fear a thing of the past.  When you are about to start a new project think of all the possible outcomes. 

Become a Positive Thinker

Positive thinking builds self-confidence.  It counter acts low self-esteem and is the counter balance for self-sabotage.

Consider the Worse-Case Scenario

We take a lot of the fear of the unknown out when we consider just how bad it could turn out.  Sometimes the worse-case scenario would be really bad and it would be reasonable to fear failure.  Other cases, however, might prove to not be so bad at all.

Have a Plan B

Having a plan B opens up the door to move fearlessly towards your goals.  Knowing that there is a contingency plan in place might be just the extra confidence you need to move forward.

If you learned anything new from this article then please leave a comment.