Fear of failure comes from the feeling of failing past goals/expectations or from being pressured starting at a young age by peer/family to never fail. Almost like failure wasn’t/isn’t allowed. The thoughts of failure alone can be scary. What if I’m not good enough? What if this happens or that? This has happened before I need to protect myself from it happening again. Those what if’s are the worst!
Thoughts of failure and failure can absolutely be scary! But unfortunately failure is a part of life, it is how we grow as people. Failure and success go hand in hand. We have to fail to know what works in order to succeed.
For some not only failure can be paralyzing but the fear alone of it can stop us from living to our best potential. You will miss out on opportunities in life from not allowing yourself to fail. Not only that but going into things with the fear or the expectation to fail will lead you to fail! The way we talk to ourselves can actually lead us towards our failures.
Letting our fear guide us in life to protect us may seem comforting but it is a coping mechanism that hurts you. And the fact that you are reading this shows you are most likely sick of it, am I right? So what do you do? It seems too hard to get past this fear! Don’t worry I got you. Here are some steps to get past the fear of failure.
A lot of times when we fail, we can be really hard on ourselves and build it up to be worse in our heads than it actually may be. So it is good to go through each failure one by one and address how it helped you in your life today or what lesson you learned from it. This will also help redirect your feelings of utter failure to gratitude and acceptance.
How can you grow as a person from this? What are some positive things? Did you maybe set your goals too high? Now you know to set lesser goals even if they seem easy to someone else. We are all different humans that work at different paces. Maybe you trusted the wrong people? Now you know things to look out for when trusting someone. There is a lesson in each hard ship. Go through them and pick it out!
Stop beating yourself up about past failures. It does not help you with your future. It keeps you in the past to continue the cycle. Be kind to yourself. Give yourself compassion. You did the best you could at that time. It already happened and there is nothing you can do about the past. However there is something you can do about the future. You can try again, take a risk. You didn’t have the tools or the lessons back then. But now you do! Especially after reading my post haha.
This in itself is a type of exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is when you expose yourself little by little to a fear and comfort yourself in the process. A lot of times fears are learned and in or minds they mean danger! Death! Even though you are no where near danger.
Although you can’t really expose yourself to situations to make you fail that easily, you can with your imagination. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between imagined and real.
So what is happening? Are people laughing at you? Are you getting ridiculed? Is your heart racing? Starting to sweat? Go through each scary emotion and really dig deep into your feelings and the outcome of them. What is so scary about failing?
Now that you have imagined yourself into the fear and half a panic attack. Comfort yourself. Be compassionate. Talk to yourself like you would a friend and let yourself know its okay and everything is going to be okay. You didn’t die, it is a fear built up in your mind that has tormented you. Take deep breaths and imagine yourself getting through the fear. How would you like to see yourself handling it?
Research shows that positive thinking alone is not enough. We get a better outcome when we balance positive thinking with visualizing future struggles that can come up. So imagine going up to that girl, imagine trying to start that business, imagine doing the things you struggle doing. How would you like it to go?
Now imagine you just ran into an obstacle. The girl turned you down, there’s problems with starting your business, you are feeling lazy and can’t get out of bed. How would you like to handle this situation? What are you going to do different to better your life?
How about after the girl turns you down you play it cool, let yourself know it’s okay and there’s more out there. It will get easier with time and she wasn’t the one. No biggie! When there is problems starting your business how can you come up with a plan to get through those problems? Talk to yourself, let yourself know it is going to be okay. When you are feeling lazy what can you do differently to get past it? Do rewards help? Does meditating in the morning or running to the gym first thing make you less lazy? Visualize and Come up with a plan and know it will always be okay. Being prepared feels better than being unprepared and having too unrealistic expectations.
This takes practice and repetition. It isn’t a cure all over night. It may take you a bunch of times doing visualizations to get yourself where you want to be. You are going from a bad habit to a healthier one which takes training of the brain. So keep working at it and you’ll see yourself doing better and better! Now go take some risks!
What do guys think? Have you dealt with this before? How do you get past failure? Leave it all in the comments below!
Check this other post on confidence !
