Failure is a word that has a negative meaning for most of us and we avoid it as much as we can. A state that after experiencing it, despair, fear, negative thoughts and pessimism comes to many of us hand-in-hand, and take away our hope and motivation to continue the journey. Then it becomes difficult to restore the lost hope and motivation and it takes a lot of willingness and energy to start again.
Most of us use all our efforts to show that we have been successful and everything that can be seen in our records is only ‘success’. We are afraid of failure, unaware that failure is like a herbal-tea which is bitter but very beneficial at the same time!
Capability, along with learning how to fail, moves us forward on the path of success. And empowerment without resilience, makes us stop growing after not succeeding.
The best way to overcome fear is awareness. Let us see the benefits of this awareness, and learn how not get ‘drowned’ by facing failure and hold our noses up, to inhale the fresh air of resilience when necessary!
Fail Failure!
In order to fail failure, we need to be brave enough to face it wholeheartedly at the first place!
Signs Of Fear Of Failure:
- You never start something because you are afraid to fail.
- From the beginning of the journey, you keep thinking what if I fail?
- You ignore good opportunities in life because of the fear of failure.
- You are a perfectionist.
- You have low self-confidence and self-esteem.
- You don’t believe that you have the ability to give your best efforts.
- You value other people’s opinions too much, and you are constantly worried about what others think about you.
- You avoid seeing the whole picture, and only educate yourself about one side of the story. In other words, you are looking forward to fail from the start!
Why Is There A Fear Of Failure?
When we are children, we learn everything with many failures. And it is understood by us and everyone else that for example when we just start walking as a child, we will be falling again and again to succeed, but nobody considers that a failure, and it is called learning! But in adulthood, we forget about the winding road to success and become alienated by failure.
So let’s first examine the causes of fear of failure.
1. Childhood, The Foundation Of Fear Of Failure:
Children raised by cautious parents are more likely to experience an unhealthy level of fear of failure as adults. When a parent doesn’t allow their child to take risks or scolds them severely after every mistake, they actually teach them that they shouldn’t go out of their safe comfort zone, or if they go out if it, they are not allowed to make any mistakes because mistakes and failures are unforgivable for them. Creating this destructive way of thinking in a child is very harmful. So, as parents, we should teach our children how to deal with failure and learn from it instead of avoiding mistakes. (I think we also have to upgrade our old fashioned education system, and prepare the children for being able to live a good and respectful life while being happy in their future as they will be the future adults in a few years, and in order for them to be successful in the real life, we have to show them the real life methods as an individual and also as a part of the new society which is combined with technology. And only the old fashioned way of learning things which they may never use in their real life is not good enough in my eyes, but this subject is not for this article, and maybe we discuss about it another time.)
2. Low Self-Confidence:
People who have enough self-confidence know that they will not always succeed and they blame themselves less in case of any failure or mistake. But those who have low self-confidence, when they fail, instead of examining it’s causes, they turn it into a painful and annoying experience by blaming and putting negative labels on themselves and others. If after every mistake and failure you say to yourself: “Shouldn’t have started this”, “You can never do it right”, or tell yourself “I always ruin everything!” next time, instead of imprisoning yourself in a safe zone, focus on increasing your self-confidence.
3. Perfectionism, Intensifying The Fear Of Failure:
There are traces of perfectionism can be seen in many things. This extremely negative and house-wrecking feature, can be seen everywhere! Perfectionists consider failure not a part of the process of success, but a great and unforgivable sin! Having this view of error causes a lot of fear. Even in many cases, perfectionist people prefer not to start something rather than start and fail… I know what I am saying, When |I tell you in real life perfectionism can really be considered as one of the things to avoid!
Knowing about perfectionism and controlling it, reduces the fear of failure.
4. Inadequate Support:
We humans are social creatures by nature, and human relationships have a great impact on various aspects of our lives. Getting support from others is one of the needs that is provided through human relations. People who get this support from those around them are usually less afraid of failure.
5. Having Unrealistic Expectations:
Similar to perfectionism, having unrealistic expectations is something that should be avoided too. When we expect to succeed with the first attempts before starting the path, and then we face the first failure, we are disappointed and feel fear and worry. Examining the biographies of successful people and seeing their failures in the process of achieving success helps to correct our expectations.
6. Trauma And Painful Experience:
People who have faced great and painful failures, usually, have problems to start again, and they bear a lot of fear by remembering the pain and suffering of the past, sometimes the trauma can go back to our childhood memories without our knowledge. In such cases, if the trauma is too much, it can be harmful to us and even to the people around us! Referring to a therapist, psychoanalyst or a psychologist can be useful to help us if we have faced extreme and painful experiences in the past which can harm our wellbeing and success one way or another.
7. Caring Much About Other People’s Opinions About Us:
People who care too much about other people’s opinions sometimes become people-pleasers and have a great desire for people around them to accept them, recognize them as a completely successful person or acknowledge their efforts. As a result, they are afraid of failure, they don’t want to be different, and sometimes they don’t do what they really want in life and avoid taking steps for themselves, in order to avoid failure and stay accepted by those people, or just to be in the safe side with them to avid being erased from their circle.
8. Expansion Of Cyber Space:
Internet gave us so much, and there is no doubt about it. But as we live in an age where internet and the social media is too present, slowly our communication is not just limited to a small circle of family, relatives and friends anymore, but many of us socialize through the virtual world, where we are connected with a much larger number of people than the older generations had ever had in their life. Being exposed to so many people, and all the social trends, the tags and the labels that make us trying to “fit” in them, gave many of us the FOMO “fear of missing out”, from a group, social etiquette or even a fashion or beauty trend. And we got so much used to our phones and the social media that we got somehow addicted to being always online, and present in the internet and absent from the reality sometimes. While many other things that the internet gives us are good, it also made many of us afraid of failure or afraid from failing in being ‘perfect’ in the eyes of the online society.
Also, the fact that most people -specially the influencers- tend to only show their best looks in the social platforms, or only show-off their ‘successes’ and achievements in everything in the virtual space, promotes this way of thinking that -failure is an unnatural thing- and only happens to us if we are not good enough or perfect in everything like them. Or if we have the slightest imperfection in our body or looks, or miss out the newest trends, we feel that we are not good enough because what is being presented in those platforms is just the perfection. This can go on to different aspects of life such as education, relationship, work and success as well, and that’s the reason while using the benefits of the new technology and the internet, we have to be mindful about our subconscious-minds while using them, and we have to know what we want to do about it too!
10 Ways To Overcome The Fear Of Failure:
In this part, we want to turn failure from a ‘scary giant’ into a safe and acceptable creature! Let’s learn how not to be afraid of failure and minimize it, and take appropriate actions when facing failure to pass it with good results.
1. Learning To Kill The Fear Of Failure:
Many times, the reason for failure can be lack of our ability and necessary skills to do something. As a result, we should try to acquire the necessary skills before starting the journey and even then, of course, be careful not to fall into the trap of perfectionism. Perfectionist people get into trouble here, because they want to be completely ready in every way and then start, and this causes them not to start or face procrastination. As a result, improving our skills and learning the related things to the goal, can be very useful. If you can read this article, it means you can search and learn so many things, so don’t underestimate your learning abilities, just go ahead and start!
2. Thinking About The Worst Case Scenario:
This solution may seem pessimistic at first glance, but it has two positive effects:
- When we think about the worst case that can happen, we often realize that it is not that bad and it’s different aspects are not going to take us by surprise. This reduces the fear of failure.
- By thinking about it, we can evaluate and see that there are many success scenarios for it too. So we can find ways to prevent the worst cases. And this also reduces our fear of failure.
3. Expect To Fail and Rise Up Again:
It is very good to be confident. But there is a line between being realistically confident and being over-confident! When we consider ourselves free from any mistakes and think that failure is only for others, and does not happen to us, we will be surprised when we are faced with it, and then we cannot apply appropriate solutions to rise up again. But if we have this way of thinking that failure is part of the path and may happens to everyone including us, we will face it better, and we will allow ourselves to learn and grow from it, even sometimes better and stronger than before!
4. Examining The Possible Results, Reducing The Fear Of Failure:
Along the way, whenever we make a decision, thinking about the possible results can create the necessary preparation in us. This allows us to face unknown situations well enough. For example, let’s say that if I make decision A, it will lead to results A1, A2 and A3, and if I make decision B, I will get results B1 and B2. Then I can check all the possible results and write a possible solution for each result. This work, in addition to making us make well-made decisions, also saves us from being surprised by possible obstacles.
5. Failure To Magnify:
Sometimes, people make failures a very big and scary thing in their minds, and by exaggerating it for themselves, they not only increase their fear of it, but also destroy the motivation and hope to continue trying. As a result, realistic analysis of failure is very important and we have to be careful how we handle tough situations and manage our thoughts and emotions.
6. Thinking About Controllable Things:
When facing failure, running away is the worst solution, and running away from it not only does not remove the failure and fear caused by it from our path, but also causes more failure and adds the fear of repeating itself to it. When we face failure, we feel that all things are out of our control and the anxiety and worry takes over our whole emotions, in this situation, categorizing things into ‘controllable’ and ‘non-controllable’ things saves us from confusion and by prioritizing the ‘controllable; things, we can take back control of the situation. Thinking about the things we can control also increases our self-confidence and removes the feeling that we are no longer capable of anything, because we will be in control of the things that can be controlled, and we will not put all of our attention to the thing that we can not control at the time. So our energy and attention will be on focusing on the right side of it.
7. Learning From Failure:
Sometimes people experience multiple failures with similar reasons, and find themselves on a repeating cycle of facing the similar unwanted results over and over again. The reason for this is not examining the true hidden and obvious reasons and not looking at them with the eye for reality. Recognizing reasons, mistakes, lessons and remembering them will help us not to be empty-handed when it comes to getting positive results as an outcome and to get promoted with valuable lessons or positive results.
In fact, not seeing the whole reality and not learning from failures is a real failure! And that’s why we sometimes see it repeating itself in multiple ways ,until we learn the skills and lessons that we need to pass them with success.
8. No Censorship!
We all think that expressing failure means admitting being weak or being unable to achieve success, when in reality, by sharing our failures with others as a step of our process, or asking for ways to overcoming it from other, we open-up a way for success and we can use their experiences and knowledge and overcome the failure or take the necessary steps to success.
9. Correct Examination Of The Causes Of Failure:
We must keep in mind that sometimes external factors that are not under our control have an effect on failure too. If we always blame ourselves for failure and ignore external factors, we will lose the self-confidence to start again or even try for new possible ways for finding solutions. So, in the face of failure, in addition to examining our mistakes, we should also pay attention to the external conditions that caused it as well.
10. Pay Attention To The Past Patterns:
A good way to deal with failure is to cheat! That is, to tell ourselves “let’s look at our past and see which solutions have worked in previous failures and which methods have not been suitable or good enough for this situation” and by following the right steps that we have taken or learned again, we can go through it and be more successful. Looking at the trials and errors, and studying the patterns like a study case, can teach us the right way to overcome failures and by using this methods, we can avoid failure. This method is unique for each person based on their own experiences, and while we all can learn from each other’s stories, we have to keep in mind that all of us have our own unique life story too and we are the sole creators of our future self.
Benefits Of Not Being Afraid:
When we get sick and visit the doctor, sometimes the doctor prescribes a medical injection for us, and even though we are afraid of it, we do the injection anyways. But why? Of course! Because we all know it is logical and as long as it can help us get the cure to our body, we will be ok with the fear and the pain of it. Just because we trust the doctor and know that indeed the medical injection is really useful for speeding up the recovery process. So, one of the ways to reduce the fear of scary things is to know and consider it’s benefits beyond our fears. Trusting the process it is! (Don’t write to me to say that this wasn’t a good example, and you are not afraid of injections! As a person who has a Big fear of them, it’s hard for me to believe you!) 😀
Now, by explaining the benefits of failure, we will try to reduces the fear of failure in our mind:
Benefits Of Failure:
1. You Will Learn More By Avoiding The Distractions:
Imagine that a high school student constantly participates in the extra exams of the second grade of elementary school, and passes the exams successfully. When you ask them why they do this hard work in their side studies and put too much effort in un important exams, they may say “Because I succeed in them and I feel very good about the results every time!”. Then what will you say to them? They are high-school students and for sure the tests from the elementary school is not very hard for them, because they have already finished their elementary school. So, you may think to say “But by these successes, you don’t add anything to your values and your actual education! You have to pass the real school exams of your high-school studies and then prepare for the hard courses of the final year of the high school in order to be promoted for a good collage, and there is the right point that if you succeed, you can become very proud and happy!”
This example shows that always being ‘successful’ is not necessarily a good sign for the long term achievements. Sometimes, it can mean that you deal with issues below your level, and those issues are not even for you to consider at the first place! And you fail to succeed or get promoted because of the unnecessary distractions that you have. It is truly important to avoid distractions or putting so much effort on the unnecessary things, as much as it is important to not focusing on the possibilities of failure only.
So after it is best to pay most of your attention to your goals and after every failure, be happy and tell yourself that ‘this will help to improve me and help me learn and grow’, then avoid all the distractions and focus on moving forward towards your goal and personal growth.
2. You Will Find High Endurance:
Hardships, problems and failures all turn us into a more resilient version of ourselves. Being resilient helps us in the path of success. Helps us not to break-down, with the accruing problems and challenges.
Having high resilience is very beneficial for us when it comes to personal growth too, as growth and development takes time and does not happen overnight.
And, failure, is one of the ways to increase resilience.
3. Will You Be Patient?
In today’s age, when everything has become so speedy like using the super fast trains for transportation in many countries, and getting used to the fast-food, we got used to having access to whatever we want in the shortest possible time. And yes, it has saved us a lot of time and energy and gave us a lot of benefits too, but at the same time, as a result, we have forgotten about ‘patience’ too!
We don’t see long stories about peoples success on social platforms, we don’t read long texts, we usually avoid long discussions, and we are afraid of taking too much time from each other on a normal day, or many of us avoid reading long books. And unfortunately, many of us don’t remember how is it to be calm and patient’ at the same time anymore. When it comes to giving things the right amount of time and patience, we put the glass ceilings that has an invisible short limit for us, and we tend to forget about it.
Also, when it comes to life and we start a path, we want to succeed as quickly as possible, maybe because we forget about the necessary steps and maybe because there is a competition between us and everyone else in our mind and we fear missing-out if we don’t catch-up! Probably we need to go back to the ‘ negative impacts of the social media’ subject, again!
But in real life, failures do put a brake on this rush, and make us pause and become patient on the way to achieving our goals. They remind us that as some things come easy and fast in life, and for some other things, we have to be patient. And usually for some pleasures, including the pleasure of success, being patient and being okay with small fails here and there, is actually good for the whole process and even makes the achievements sweeter and more memorable for us.
4. You Add To Your Experience:
According to the above, we saw that if we are smart, we can fill our backpacks with many valuable life lessons, and the instructive points after being patient after each failure on the way, not only help us to avoid repeating our mistakes, but they actually help us getting promoted to a higher level of wisdom too. This means if we see each failure as an experience that increases our wisdom by it, we can teach ourselves to use the gained wisdom in our own growth.
5. You Identify Better Opportunities:
During the sad times of the Covid19 pandemic, we saw many businesses that failed in their face-to-face interactions with the customers, but then they multiplied their profits by launching or expanding their online sales (think of restaurants for an example).
So, many opportunities are created from failures in some areas of life. So, when facing failures, you can catch the right opportunities by asking the right questions and looking for the solutions that rise with them, the opportunities, that would not have arisen if everything went perfectly well, or without any failure and hardship.
6. You Become More Risk-Averse:
When you experience failure and you say to yourself “No, I wasn’t that afraid to fail”, you become braver and more risk-taking than before. So next time, if something similar comes up for you, you will have the courage to take it again in a situation where you know that there is a possibility of failure, but you will not be afraid and you will not back-down because you are aware of the possibilities of success too. Sometimes it is this risk-taking that puts us in good situations and give us the best possible outcomes based on our past failures and our present risk-taking and courageous behavior is what leads us to our success.
7. You Enjoy Success More:
Success after failure is like eating chocolate after drinking a bitter cup of coffee! (You know what I’m talking about, if you enjoy drinking coffee without sugar!), If you eat that chocolate alone, you will enjoy it to some extent, but eating sweets after feeling the bitterness, doubles its pleasure for many of us. So, we have to endure the bitterness of failure to enjoy the sweetness of success with all of our heart.
Beware Of The Cycle Of Fear-Of-Failure!
If you are caught in the trap of this cycle, getting rid of it is the work of only the willing and strong-minded people!
But What Is The Cycle Of Fear Of Failure?
Let’s review it’s steps together:
When you are afraid of failure, it means that you do not have the courage to step in the paths where the possibility of failure is present.
As a result, you don’t do anything and become a passive person.
Then you create this mental impression in yourself and others that “you are not capable of doing anything successful in that area.”
In the next stage, you will make it collapse. That is, this mental idea that you are not capable of doing something right no matter how hard you try!
Then, it turns into a belief for you, and you constantly label yourself or label the goal negatively and this cycle can grow stronger until you completely give up to it’s invisible trap and end giving-up!
In the end, this destructive belief leads to more intense fear and this cycle continues forever if you don’t stop it at some point.
The way out of the cycle is to take action!
When you try to start something, you will face two results:
- If you succeed by eliminating the destructive mental image, you will regain your self-confidence and get out of the passive mode by taking the next steps
- If you fail, you will realize that it is not so scary to fail, as you have a new experience now, and you will have more courage to start again for the next time.
In conclusion, I would like to mention a few points.
The First Point
Sometimes we call some changes in direction of life and goals, as failures, for example, some of us may say “I have changed my job a few times already, and I feel like a failure”, but maybe this is not really a failure, and it is only the experiences that we have as part of our growth process in the ladder of success. Or maybe every time we do change our job we learn new things, and over time those things will give us so much beneficial experiences that we can later use them in our long-lasting job where we are happy to work, or maybe they are the lessons that we need to learn to become successful as an entrepreneur or start a startup. But at the time of facing the temporary failures and the pauses that life makes us take, we take them as a penalty for a life-time failure!
Sometimes finding our true talents, interests and goals in life requires a more challenging process or a different path than others. So trial and error are part of it, and we may realize this after insisting on following a path similar to others that does not suit us or simply does not work for us for any reason, and changing it, may be the best decision that we can make in our career. But if we keep looking at ourselves as failures we may never take this step.
Also, for this example, in many job markets, this is a natural process and should not be mistakenly labeled as failure. We should also know that sometimes the correctness of the path and decisions are separated from the results. Maybe some of the paths and decisions that we make have unwanted results too, but they were the right choice at the time we made them based on the circumstances, or even the only choice that we had at the time.
So when you look back at your life and want to label the experiences or memories as a failure, try to remember the complete story, and sometimes when you look at the complete puzzle, it becomes much more easy to see it’s main image and make a better conclusion about it.
The Second Point
The next point is that the fear of failure has evolutionary roots. Because the human brain is made for growth, reproduction and survival. So it is natural that it is more sensitive to the challenging things. Failure is one of these challenging things that the brain activates the danger alarm when it faces it, and takes a front against it immediately! The way to get rid of the brain’s alarm is to teach the brain that failure is not the enemy of our success, but sometimes it is necessary to achieve success. (Many of us learned to ride a bicycle by experiencing falling-down a few times, and that was okay at the time. Because here we are! We learned it, and we are fine!) 🙂
For sure I am not trying to convince anyone to fail purposefully, but I am trying to explain that we should not be frightened from failure in life. In many cases, Success is meaningful next to Failure, because it is part of the success process. Just as happiness and sadness are meaningful when they come together and they both are necessary and part of the life process.
The Third Point
As a last point, I would like to say that sometimes yellow psychology pages, have extreme and unrealistic optimism that say things such as “if you even think about failure, you will not succeed, so avoid thinking about it” or “you did your best at your first try, so don’t go trying again, as if it was meant for you, the first try would be successful!”.
While it is good to be mentally strong and giving it al we can when we try to achieve our goals, we should avoid giving ourselves limited access to success. Success is not limited, and if we fail once or even a few times, it does not describe us a an unworthy person.
We can think about failure in another way and have a proper understanding of it when it comes to success by including the possible ways of failures in our success plan, and generally embrace failure if it happens, as it is part of life too. Because we will not go forward in smooth and successful paths all the time, and sometimes we learn valuable lessons from the failures that rise along the way. In times when we consider the difficulties and failures as part of the real life, the accepting behavior will help to elevate us.
As an example, you can listen to the famous football player Cristiano Ronaldo when he talks about his past, and also you can read about so many other people who have become so successful after undergoing so much hardships and facing failure in their life. These people did not fear failure, they learned to accept the failures they faced as part of their empowering story, and moved beyond the limitations by using the lessons they learned from those failures to be where are are in life right now!
P.S
With this recommendation, I want to add that people’s resilience in the face of failure and difficulties is different. Sometimes so much pressure, or many unpleasant events one after another may result to make us struggle to gain back our power and struggle to stand strong. And sometimes we need to ask for help from a professional or psychologist to increase our resilience or put things to their right place in our life and start again. In no way should we ignore this important issue.
We are all humans and if we are going through difficult conditions, and we are thinking about giving up, we should not try to bear it alone. Mental health is a very important thing and trying to maintain it, is the first step that we need to take when facing too much difficulties in life.
So if you feel that you have been strong for too long, or you need help as things have been in a way that they put too much pressure on your mental-wellbeing. Please don’t neglect it! Hang in there, get help, and Do-Not-Give-Up on the good side of life. Everything will be better if you take the steps and willingly allow things to be better.
And, if recently you have had a tough time, I just want to send you lots of positive energy, good vibes, and many good wishes. 🙂
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