How Can I Overcome My Fear of Failure?
In high school, our ice hockey coach was a demigod. Hockey at school was so important that it almost stepped over the concept of a sport. Our coach was a born teacher and deftly weeded the lessons of life into almost every hockey lesson. And there were a lot of hockey lessons.
This answer originally appeared as a Quora answer .
One day he introduced a new exercise that involved rolling backward from one end of the roller to the other while covering as much of the side surface as possible (it looked like cutting the S back and forth). Skating backward quickly while overcoming the side surface is a very difficult skill to perform even for the best players.
In an effort to impress, we all tried our best, but carefully. When we gathered at the other end, the coach scolded us for what we did wrong, despite the fact that no one fell. We did it wrong because we tried to make it perfect . He ordered us to do it again, and if we didn’t fall it was because we didn’t try hard enough.
In the next round, no one survived unharmed. The essence of the exercise was to push us beyond our capabilities, and we did that and stretched out, flew and crashed on the ice. By doing the exercises every week, we could all see and feel that we were getting better and better. We continued to fall, but we got faster and covered more territory. The failure we feared did not impress our coach, and the true failure did not improve the situation.
Fear of failure is the real defense and reaction of your mind. Most of the response is to try and protect you from perceived threats. The key word here is “perceived” threats. This part of our brain is designed to protect us from real physical threats like predators. So what is designed to protect against lions activates now when we want to take risks or do something outside our comfort zone, and ultimately holds us back and limits. The problem is that our threat system is not very good at distinguishing between real physical threats and perceived risks.
Your comfort zone is more than just a concept; the expansion of these boundaries causes quite real neurophysiological reactions of the system of threats of the mind. What defines your comfort zone inherently sets the boundaries that trigger that system. Stay within these boundaries and you are safe, go beyond them and the system warns us by bringing fear to the surface. Your mind is doing what it evolved to do: defending itself by signaling fear of perceived risk, ignorance, and the unknown.
This system served us well in an evolutionary sense, when our comfort zone was the safety of our tribe. The risky, unfamiliar and unknown posed a real threat to our security. The risk is not physical safety, but emotional safety. Yet the risky, unfamiliar, and unknown still launches our reactive fear system in a torrent of fear, paralyzing and warning thoughts.
As you push and stretch your comfort zone even slightly, you begin to drop those boundaries and trigger points and become comfortable, gradually becoming more and more uncomfortable.
Riding backwards on the rink, trying not to fall, was our comfort zone, and our coach knew that in this zone we would never improve. But when we were encouraged to fail, we expanded our boundaries. Failure became the goal. The fall was successful. And we fell until we improved, until we realized that we could go beyond our intended boundaries.
This is where you can begin to overcome your fear of failure.
Unsuccessful reframing
What is failure? The only real failure is one you don’t learn from. Facebook has repeatedly and publicly failed with ambitious initiatives like Beacon and Poke. They succeed because they fail. A common Silicon Valley startup motto is “Fail Fast, Fail Ahead.” Facebook knows the biggest setback will be not growing and pushing boundaries. If Facebook doesn’t evolve, build, and take risks, they slowly die. In sales, there is an aphorism: “Every no is one step closer to yes.” Failure is often not what you think it is. So love to hear “no” and just keep trying during the “exercise.” “No” and “yes” will come, and you will move forward gradually and inexorably.
Understand your fear
What exactly are you afraid of? We are not all afraid of the new, we take risks, change and grow for the same reasons. Fear of failure often arises from imagining a worse outcome, striving for unreasonable excellence, or desperately fearing rejection. But really, what’s the worst thing that can happen? If we go out and start a business, we pretend to lose everything if we fail. What then? Would you also lose your friends and loved ones? Wouldn’t you have your own family? Would you have lost the wits and drive that initially prompted you to start a business?
Personally, when I decided to start my own business, I lost everything in the 2008 financial crisis. I ended up with $ 250,000 in debt and unemployment looking for work in the worst job market since the Great Depression. Despite my previous setbacks, I decided to move forward and was eventually hired as head of sales at a leading firm. The truth is, nothing close to your worst-case scenario will ever materialize.
Counteract fear with confidence
The world responds and supports those who act and lead with confidence. Nobody is plotting your failure. If anything, when you are acting confident and confident, the world often conspires to support you. The right things will happen, the right circumstances and opportunities will present. Different cultures sometimes have different points of view on this; a friend who immigrated to the United States explained the difference in attitudes towards entrepreneurship between the United States and where he was from. When someone shared a business idea with others in their country, they often told them that it was impossible and why it was not achievable. In the United States, many people respond by supporting the idea, recognizing the person’s courage, and offering help in meeting friends and other forms of support.
