It’s often said that one of the biggest challenges we face as humans is the fear of failure. Funny enough it literally stops us in our tracks. So many people that I meet at my events when asked about why they haven’t accomplished what they set out to do respond with “I’m scared that I may fail”.
Now I believe that it isn’t as simple as this. Because this answer sounds linear (if that then this) however I believe that it is much more complex than that. There are many elements around fear and failure and they can have many different starting points for each individual. Let me explain.
Some people fear failure not because of eth failure itself but because of what comes with the failure, or should I say the perceived outcome of the failure in some cases. So let’s say your father said “If you don’t win this race (example: school running race when you were 8 years old) you’re going to be a loser or a failure you may have translated that into” If I fail at this, in my father’s eyes I’m going to be a loser” so better not even try to do this that way I can’t fail. See how complex this can be?
In another case, you may have spent money on marketing or some other part of your business and for whatever reason, you may have in your mind “failed” which may have cost you a pretty penny or set you back from where you are at the moment. Once again you have recorded that in your memory as failure and as such now have a fear of failure.
An even more relative scenario is fearing about what someone else is going to think or say about you. This I feel is one of the most relative reasons for why the majority of the populous would rather not engage in activity that may put them into a situation where they may deem themselves as failures.
So if you really look at the scenarios some may have been implanted memories that love to rear their ugly head every time you are in that particular situation of decision making or real memories that have been interpreted as bad and or negative. The point is the word FEAR I believe translates to False Expectations Appearing Real or things that haven’t even happened yet are going to be bad. Then the word Failure is only failure if you have interpreted it in that way. How about if we changed it to feedback? Would that give you a different outlook?
So in the earlier two cases. You didn’t win the race but you now know where you rank and you have the ability to keep trying to get better or the money spent on the business who’d you a way not to do it and you then have the ability to learn from that for the next campaign or you would try new things and not have the fear of worrying about what anybody thought about you, now you have a whole new outlook.
In Summary – Don’t be incapacitated by what the possibility of the perceived outcome may be. Or be in a situation where you are worried about what people may think or say about you. Whatever the outcome has installed for you the key to dealing with the fear of failure is by looking at any future situation as feedback be it the good, the bad or the ugly. With this in mind rather than you giving your power away to fear you now have the ability to regain your power through your ability to make a favourable decision based on whatever outcome is at hand.
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