Facing the Fear of Failure
It’s okay to fail. Let’s face the fear monster directly.
It’s about time we faced the giant monster in the room. It’s the failure monster and if you’ve been scared of it since childhood, well it’s probably grown into mythic proportions. Just the thought of the failure monster might scare you out of action. It’s time to look at it directly and face it. Every client that struggles to launch or is excessively concerned with judgment is concerned about failure. So let’s break it down
What is failure? And why does it bother us?
Failure is the lack of achievement when we aim for something. So if we aim for things that are easy, failure is less likely. Heck, if we don’t aim for things at all, it’s impossible to fail. Perhaps you made this agreement to yourself, so you never try.
There’s a problem though, “never trying” feels empty. Only aiming for easy things and avoiding challenge feels meaningless. There’s a part deep inside that doesn’t agree with that trade, this empty, stuck, hollow feeling just won’t go away. But at least you don’t experience failure right?
Here’s a thought experiment, would you play any game for a while if you were always rigged to win? It’s a profound discovery to make, that is struggle is inherent in meaningful goals.
Source: Fauzan Saari, Unsplash
The feelings of failure are necessary, but often misinterpreted as something to avoid. It’s a signal to assess your actions and improve your probability of success in your next endeavour. That’s it. Everything else is your interpretation and evaluation of the physical outcome of non-success.
Here’s an example: let’s say you want to get a new job.
Well, you can go for jobs that you will be a shoe-in for, but then those jobs wouldn’t really pay more or offer more opportunities than the one you plan to change from. So you have to attempt jobs that you might not be 100% fully qualified, perfectly matched for. Well what happens is that you’re more likely to experience failure, and that’s usually proportional to the meaningfulness and scarcity of the opportunity.
OK! you prepare and you give it your best shot, and you don’t get the job. You feel sad, rejected, loss that you didn’t get the job. Then your mind does something peculiar, sometimes it overgeneralizes your failure from this incident to other areas of your life. You might have thoughts that your failure to get this job means that you are a failure as a husband, a person or a provider. You might start forecasting your feeling of failure into the future and get thoughts that you’ll never get a job. Heck, you might get thoughts that this failure is the worst thing that has happened to you and magnify those thoughts . When you have these thoughts, you feel fear or sadness or both, then you may even start to disengage from pursuing your goals and decide not try.
But we’ve been here before, “not trying” leads to meaninglessness. So we feel stuck, because if we try, we risk all the negative emotions associated with failure and if we don’t try we feel meaningless. A “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation.
Ask yourself, what does it mean if you failed at an attempt at your goal?
For some, it’s the potential negative social judgement and possible disapproval from loved ones. It’s shameful to be a failure.
For others it’s self imposed expectations on themselves that are unmet
Keep asking yourself, drill all the way down, find your most hidden fear and complete the sentence:
“I’m scared to try, because if I fail that would mean…”
Whatever it is, it’s worth seeing if that belief is really true in an objective and realistic sense? Is your partner really going to think your worthless while you try to achieve your meaningful goals. Are you really going to get the job you really really want on your first try? Is it realistic to think that your ideal job is your first one and not your 5th one?
Here’s my personal thoughts on this. Trying is a mandatory part of engaging in your ambitious and meaningful goals, and failure is somewhat expected and accepted. When I first experienced failure, I didn’t have a system of how to deal with it and continue with my goals. While I floundered, thoughts of shame, incompetence and demanding-ness to be exceptional often lingered. Over time, I had to develop a imperfect system to process failure and use tools to manage the psychological aspects of failure.
Today, when failure visits, and it regularly does, I follow these 7 steps:
Describe – Write down what happened
Analyse – Examine why it occurred that way
Cause – Identify the causes and which of them were in my control
Responsible – Choose to openly accept what I was responsible for, accept that others have roles too.
Recommend – Figure out what I can do in future in order to shift the odds of success, e.g. take ownership of the problems, up-skill myself, delegate to someone, re-approach the problem differently etc..
Actions – Identify what can I do now that will help me towards my goals. This could include taking care of myself until I process it or act on a recommendation i identified earlier
Head up and move forward – Accept that obstacles are inevitable and are opportunities to demonstrate virtue (i.e. the Stoic Approach) and keep moving forward to my goals
The process isn’t perfect, but it works for me. Fortunately, you can use additional mental skills to help you manage excessive, perfectionistic, harsh and self-critical thoughts as well (next post).
It’s a deeply rewarding trade when we choose to be the “person that risks failure for success” rather than the “person that doesn’t try”.