Many people have deeply ingrained beliefs about failure. The prevention of failure is a common goal in many societies. In contrast to this, many successful people are those who have failed previously, and who have learned to fail well.
Our fear of failure has created a whole new market of “positive thinking” methods. Beware though—positive thinking can harm your progress, and can result in higher levels of failure. Why? People often apply positive thinking in the wrong place. Let me use an example to explain:
Imagine you regularly walk along a dark road at night. There are many potholes you can’t see. Often you step in one and stumble or fall. It hurts.
One day you read a great self-help book about positive thinking. The next night you start your journey along that road with a big smile on your face, thinking “I shall walk along this road with ease.” Imagine your surprise when you step into yet another pothole and hurt yourself. It’s likely that you feel even worse about falling, and believe that all the positive thinking has been a waste of time.
What you need are tools that help you find solutions for avoiding the potholes. For example, perhaps you could buy a torch or flashlight. If not, find a stick and push it along the road in front of you. You could also take a different route altogether.
This is where to apply positive thinking. Affirm your ability to learn from your failures. Assert your ability to find creative solutions to avoid the potholes in future.
While this is a simple example, how many people do you know continue to walk along a similar road in life? They fear the next time they will step into a pothole, and appear unable to learn from their experiences.
There are many ways that a fear of failure can reveal itself to you. Three symptoms are:
· Escape mechanisms. You may develop defenses or escape mechanisms. For example, you may find ways to avoid training. You may procrastinate more than usual, or you may spend too much time reading, intellectualizing or watching TV. You may find you want to sleep even when you don’t feel tired. You may lose focus during training or study, or you may eat too much, clean too much or shop too much.
· Anxiety. Often when you forcibly subdue the fight or flight reflex, it lets you know though anxiety. Symptoms of this may include general anxiety, stress, nervousness, a sore neck or backaches, out of control feelings, sleeplessness, tension, hyperventilation, overreaction to minor events, and more.
· Irrational self-talk. You may suffer from excessively irrational self-talk. This includes continually going over worst case scenarios in your mind, or continually doubting your ability to succeed.
A key way to manage a fear of failure is to learn to fail well. Failing well involves changing your mindset about failure, making your fears known, getting out there and doing what you want, and dealing with the outcomes. Let’s look at these steps.
1. Change your mind-set. The first step in developing a healthy attitude to failure is to break the belief that success is good and failure is bad. Failure often comes before success, and indeed success without some failure first may be more luck than achievement.
Use assertions to change your self-talk about failure. Some examples include:
· I am flexible. I bend when I fail, and I spring back into progress.
· I handle failure well. I learn the lessons and move on.
· Challenges and setbacks are what make my goals worthwhile.
You can expand on these using scripting and creative visualization, affirming how well you handle failure. You may also want to use the mental firewall technique to block any persistent negative thoughts about failure. Only do this after you’ve documented those negative thoughts as part of the next step.
2. Make your fears known. Use the approach outlined above in “Remove the fear of the unknown. Make it known” (page 185). Bring out the facts of a fear, as well as the emotions involved. By openly discussing your fears or writing them down, they immediately start losing their power.
You may also want to consider using the “seventy by seven” technique below to help draw out some of the reasons behind your fears. Another way to bring these out is by using the Five Whys technique. Ask yourself at least five times why you fear a particular outcome.
3. Manage the risks. Consider your fears from step 2. Which ones are rational? Turn them into risks, and then understand whether you can live with those risks or if you need to plan contingencies. Consider this assertion: I take calculated risks and I make safe mistakes.
4. Get out there and do it. This is the most powerful antidote to fear of failure. Get out there and do what you want to do. Accept mistakes or failures if or when they arise. They are a natural part of the journey. Learn and develop the ability to handle failure, find solutions and keep moving forward.
5. Deal with the outcomes. If you do fail or make a mistake, deal with it properly. Document it in your review log, and talk to others about the mistake.
If you find you are making the same mistakes over and over, persistence is unlikely to help. If you keep doing the same thing without varying your approach, don’t expect a different result! Take time to analyze what isn’t working and then change your approach.