Overcoming Your Fear of Failure, Part I
How to prepare for, confront, and recover from life's setbacks
This article is the first of two parts. The second part will drop on Wednesday (3/20).
The Three Parts Of Overcoming Failure
No one likes to fail, but everyone does at some point in their lives. For many people, the fear of failure is paralyzing and stops them from overcoming obstacles and reaching their goals.
The fear of failure creates negative self-talk that keeps people from learning, growing and stretching the limits of what’s possible.
Overcoming the fear of failure is a necessary step in achieving personal goals and being successful. Scientists, psychologists, and business leaders have studied the fear of failure and how people can overcome it.
Overcoming the fear of failure is divided into three areas:
Preparing for Fear of Failure
Confronting Fear of Failure
Recovering from Failure
How a person prepares for and confronts fear determines how well they can overcome it. Recovering from failure helps people develop the resolve and confidence to overcome future fearful situations. Specific steps have been developed to help people chart a course that ends in conquering the fear of failure.
Preparing for Fear of Failure
A person must be prepared to face failure to overcome the fear of it. The right mindset minimizes the fear of failure and puts it into perspective. While it’s a part of achievement, overcoming the fear requires understanding what failure is and how to learn from it.
The steps to prepare for fear of failure are:
Redefine Failure
Find Benefits from Past Failures
Understand Threats
Create Approach, not Avoidance Goals
Redefining failure can change a person’s perception and fear level. Industry leaders in Forbes business magazine suggest that redefining failure as learning opportunities helps overcome fear.
It would not be failure if a person learned something useful from the experience, even if what they discovered was that they didn’t have the right plan to succeed.
Psychologists suggest redefining failure as discrepancies, or simply times when outcomes didn’t meet expectations. When failure is defined in less personal terms or as learning experiences, there is less to fear. For example, in his quest to invent the incandescent light Thomas Edison failed thousands of times. In response to a question about his failings he said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”
To redefine fear, a person should look to their past failures and consider the benefits they received during those times. Learning a better way, discovering a new path, and realizing a plan didn’t work all provide benefits to overcome the fear of failure in the future.
When a person uses the information and experiences they gained from previous failures, they have less to fear because they already know what to avoid.
Humans perceive failure as a threat. Because failure stops people from reaching their goals, they see it as a threat to their desires. Scientists at the University of California Berkley concluded that when people perceive a threat, their bodies prepare to fight it.
Physically, a person’s breathing and heart rate increase and they go into “fight or flight” mode. Preparing to fight produces negative stress on a person’s body and mind and can cloud their judgment, increasing their fear. These scientists suggest that a person should view failure as a challenge, not a threat. By viewing failure this way, a person can calmly and logically think through the problem and find a way to overcome it, decreasing their fear response.
To redefine a threat as a challenge, a person needs to visualize the obstacles they face. They need to determine if their fear is based on a real or imagined threat. People often fear failure because they think of the worst-case scenario, instead of focusing on positive ways to reach their goals while avoiding failure. Facing a challenge holds less fear than facing a threat.
Once a person has redefined failure, the next step is to create goals that approach success, not avoid failure. In other words, play the “game” to win, not to not lose. Approach goals by focusing on positive outcomes: learning something new, achieving a level of success, or growing to fill a need.
Avoidance goals focus on negative consequences: not freezing up during a presentation, not missing a deadline, or not falling short of a quota. Approaching goals from an optimistic perspective provides positive reinforcement while avoidance goals create fear of failure.
Stay tuned for Overcoming Your Fear of Failure, Part II.
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