It might be a career goal, starting your own business, or getting in shape. You might have thought about and researched this goal for a long time.
If you achieved it, it would be a dream come true, and it might even have the power to change your life as you know it.
But despite thinking about it and planning for it for years, you have never achieved it, and you are no closer to achieving it today, than you were 1, 2, 3 or even 12 months ago.
That big goal that was once a big, ambitious statement of intent in your mind, and a mission statement for your life, becomes nothing more than a pipe-dream or a guilty daydream you have to escape the boredom of your day-to-day routine.
And from time-to-time, when you feel brave enough, you ask yourself an important question….
“How did this happen?”
You read the books, online courses, blogs and online articles on motivation, how to set goals and achieve them, you may have even researched topics such as the Law of Attraction, but armed with all that knowledge, you are no closer to where you want to be.
In this blog post, I am hoping to answer that question, and also share with you some strategies that I hope will help you towards making some big changes in your life.
In short, if any of the above sounds familiar, this post is written for you.
How I Discovered the Fear of Failure
I have worked in the HR profession for 6 years + in recruitment, learning & development and professional training. As part of my job, I have to try and get a handle on what will make people successful in their professional lives, and in some instances, I have to help them on their journey to achieving that success through advice and training.
During my spare time, I have been obsessing over my own level of success, and I have been focused on the invisible forces that have I perceived as holding me back over the last 7-8 years of my life.
This obsession has led me to self-analyse, read, research and generally do my best to work out what it is that makes us all tick, and what the differences are between those who succeed and thrive, to those people who “just get by”.
It all started some years ago when I asked myself questions such as:
Why am I not where I want to be?
Why am I not more successful?
Why have I not pursued my real goals and ambitions?
What is stopping me pursuing my dreams?
My conclusion…
If I stripped everything away, I believe that there was one thing holding me back from achieving, and one answer to all the questions I was asking myself.
And the answer was I was afraid of failure.
Ever since making that discovery, I have become obsessed with this fear, and I believe it is one of the main reasons why so many people don’t fulfil their potential.
While many personal development experts, authors and bloggers are perfectly happy to teach you how to set achievable and ambitious goals, so few seem to know or want to talk about what it is that will stop you from ever getting started or close to achieving them.
What is Fear of Failure?
Fear of failure is a fear of the consequences of failure; the shame of it, the embarrassment and the lost opportunity cost (the lost investment of time and money that could have been spent on other things).
In my own experience of this fear, not only was I worried about what other people would think of me if I failed, I also did not want to add another case study to a growing body of evidence that I was a failure.
Another failure, would have only served to reinforce my negative self-image that I was a complete and utter failure.
How Fear of Failure Stops You From Achieving and Succeeding
When we feel the fear of failure we try our best to avoid failure entirely. To avoid failure we use defence mechanisms. And the main defence mechanism is to never really attempt to achieve our goal, because through not trying, we remove the risk of failure.
Here is how fear of failure typically works:
- You think of a big personal project or goal you want to achieve.
- You convince yourself there is a real possibility/likelihood you will fail in this project.
- Confirmation bias allows your brain to find supporting evidence from your past to reinforce this belief (essentially playing back mind movies of all those times you have failed at something before).
- The more you tell yourself this, the more you want to avoid that potential failure.
- So to avoid failure entirely, you don’t try very hard (if at all).
In the end, nothing happens, and nothing gets achieved. You have managed to avoid failure, but you are also no closer to achieving your goal either. You remain stuck.
This negative self-talk and self-sabotage is often why people don’t fulfil their potential, and also has a negative impact on people’s feelings of self-worth.
People begin to believe they are not capable of achieving…
What Causes Fear of Failure?
It’s different for everyone. It can be related to a traumatic experience you had earlier in life, that caused you to associate negative emotions with failure, and develop an unhealthy relationship with failing.
It might have been one, or a number of failures that we have a strong emotional reaction to.
Why this fear is so powerful (and why it is so hard to stop)
The fear of failure can often be a subconscious fear.
It’s ability to hide in plain sight in the corners of our mind is what it makes it so successful at stopping us from making big changes in life, or taking action on our own ideas.
In my case, I was aware of self-sabotaging behaviour holding me back from what I wanted to do in life, and I was aware there was something about my mindset that held me back, but it took me years to work out it was all down to my fear of failure, and what that meant to me.
Because people don’t know they are being affected by this fear, they very rarely get the opportunity to fix the problem.
Perhaps some of the above sounds familiar to you?
But perhaps you have never considered whether you actually are afraid of failing? Perhaps, like many others, you don’t recognise what impact a fear of failure is having on you..
To help you identify whether you are experiencing fear of failure, I have listed 7 tell-tale signs that I noticed in myself that helped me confront my fear…
7 Signs You Have Fear of Failure
The following list is not exhaustive, but these are some of the most common trends I have noticed personally, and from my research into this topic.
Go through the following list, and see how many behaviours you recognise in yourself.
Remember, we probably all feel and do some of these from time-to-time, but if you feel you do any of the below on a regular basis, there is a good chance you are experiencing fear of failure.
1. Highly Creative, Self-Sabotaging, Negative Self-Talk
Whenever you think of a project or idea, your mind seems to automatically start listing all the reasons why your plan won’t work. Just as you feel comfortable enough to start getting down to some actual work, a little voice in your head starts whispering things like;
“You’re not good enough”
“Sure, it is has worked for other people, but they are so much better than you are”
“What happens if you fail?”
“If you fail, what will your girlfriend, boyfriend, family, friends think of you?”
“Yeah, that sounds like a great approach, but let’s list all the things that might go wrong
The negative self-talk chips away at you, and erodes any feeling of positivity you might have previously felt. Dejected, you decide that in light of this new information, you should perhaps consider going back to the drawing board, or maybe just staying in your comfort zone and doing nothing at all.
2. You Hide Your Plans from People
You imagine a future where you have failed, and you begin to imagine what all of your friends, family, work colleagues and acquaintances might think and say about you.
When you imagine that future, you think about the disappointment of your family, and people whose opinions you respect and value. You worry about the impact your failure will have on your relationships.
To avoid all of this, you decide to not tell anyone about your goal. If you do end up telling anyone, you tend to downplay it’s importance, or offer a lot of excuses as to why it probably won’t happen or come to be.
By doing this, none of the people closest to you are able to support you in your pursuit of that goal, and you be miss out on the valuable advice, guidance and moral support that they could offer.
3. Over-Researching (Paralysis by Analysis)
You have an idea for a business, project, or health regime in your mind. You know your desired outcomes, and you know roughly what you need to do to bring your ideas to life. However, instead of knuckling down and getting to work on your ideas, you know you need to prepare yourself for the upcoming task. Even more than that, you also know you probably need to up-skill yourself and improve your capacity to try and do these new things.
You start by researching your idea. In detail. As time goes on, you know you need to make some progress, but instead of taking any action, you do more research, trying to account for every possible/likely scenario (success, failure, un-expected surprises and obstacles).
The more research you do, the more you realise you don’t know, and the more research you decide to do. You want to make sure you are ready.
Eventually, the research you are doing has 2 effects:
- It causes you to question everything. You don’t want to put a foot wrong, so you never get started, and you get stuck in a cycle of doing more research looking for all the answers to all of your questions.
- You start to convince yourself that research is work. You feel like as long as you are researching things, you are doing “something” towards your goals. The problem with this is, research alone never delivers results, and nothing ever changes.
4. Perfectionism (a close relative to Paralysis by Analysis in my opinion)
You don’t want to put anything “out there in the World” until everything is perfect, and all of your ducks are neatly lined up in a row.
You research things endlessly. Unlike the research symptoms, you actually do a little work, but typically, you’re not happy with it, or you never quite finish it. It’s never ready for the World to see it, so you never take that all important step of actually launching your big idea and taking the actions you need to take to see results.
5. General Procrastination and Staying in your Comfort Zone
You are overly optimistic about the time you have available to do your project. You delay taking any action and constantly prioritise other things.
You might rationalise this behaviour by saying things like:
“I have bigger things to worry about right now. I will sort out this other stuff first, and then I will be ready to give this my full attention/focus”
Some of those other “things” and “priorities” might be:
- Your job/career
- A promotion at work
- Looking after your family
- Moving house
- Hitting a certain financial target
- Saving for a holiday
- Relationship goals
- This list could go on, on, on and on….
Even worse than this, sometimes the things you prioritise aren’t even that important. Some examples:
“I’m going to get started on this right away, but first, I’m going to…”
- Play Call of Duty
- Watch some amusing cat videos on Youtube
- Find out what the Kardashians are up to via the magic of reality TV
- Go for a walk
- Read
- Sun tan
- You get my drift….
You are living in your comfort zone, and when you live in your comfort zone, the only thing that really matters is your immediate comfort and pleasure. You never take the first step towards your longer-term, bigger goals.
6. Inability to Make Decisions
Instead of making a decision, you make no decision at all. Again, this is a close relative to Paralysis by Analysis and over-researching.
You think deeply about all the possible options you have available to you, but you never feel confident enough to take a leap of faith and make a decision.
What you fail to notice, is that deciding to make no decisions, is actually a decision.
7. You Worry About Your Future
You worry about your future, and question whether things will ever be better, and whether you will ever be happy.
You begin to question your own abilities and skills. Because you always elect to avoid failure, you don’t get into the habit of overcoming failure and succeeding.
The lack of achievement/success feeds a negative self-image you have of yourself. You lose confidence.
You start seeing yourself in a negative light, and questioning whether you will ever succeed at anything, and how this will impact your longer-term future.
What to do About it
Fear of failure and negative thinking in general affects different people in different ways. For some, it will be a case of training themselves to think differently, and install different thought patterns into their daily routines.
For others negative thinking can have a crippling affect on their lives, preventing them from taking any real action in their lives. If you think you might fall into this category, it may be worth investing some time (and possibly some money) speaking with a coach, or in more extreme cases, a mental health professional.
I am not a mental health professional, but for those people who feel frustrated by their own negative thoughts and self-sabotage, I will be writing my next post on how I overcame fear of failure, and the strategies you can use to do the same.
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