We looked at the fear of failure and the tell-tale signs you might be affected by it in this post.
Today, I want to talk about what I focussed on and some of the actions I took to try an overcome the fear of failure. I am not a mental health professional, or “shrink”, but my hope is that some of these suggestions will help people on their way to overcoming some of their own mental blocks.
To that end, feel free to copy, modify and use any of the strategies I describe below if you feel it would be useful.
To beat overcome the fear, I focussed on doing six things:
- Acknowledging the fear.
- Worked on building my self-confidence.
- I reframed failure in my mind (I changed my understanding and relationship with failure).
- Changed my reaction to failure (by changing focus).
- I prepared for the worst and hoped for the best (Stopped Catastrophizing).
- I took action.
Acknowledging the fear
The first step in fixing a problem is recognising that you have it. After being honest with myself about the fear, I made a conscious effort to recognise when the fear of failure was affecting my thinking.
Rather than trying to fight some of those negative thinking patterns, I simply acknowledged them, and then decided to focus on thinking about something else until the feeling had passed.
Working on self-confidence
To build self-confidence, I recommend reconnecting with a hobby you used to do, or a hobby you have been interested in. The hobby should be something completely unrelated to the big goal you are trying to achieve.
Over time, you will either reconnect with a skill you were once good at, or you will learn and develop a new skill.
Whether the hobby you choose is old or new, you will get into the habit, of learning, developing, failing and succeeding. The more you do this hobby, the more you will achieve, and the more confidence you will build.
This approach has two key benefits:
- It helps remind us that we are capable of succeeding when we apply ourselves to something, which helps boost our self-image.
- By doing a hobby that is unrelated to some of our more serious life goals, it gives us a healthy break, and provides us with an enjoyable distraction, to help recharge our batteries.
In my case, I had practiced martial arts throughout my childhood. Taking that up again as an adult brought back a lot of good memories, and helped anchor the idea in my subconscious that I am skilled, capable, and able to achieve things.
Reframing Failure
“Reframing failure” is a fancy way of saying, “change the way you think about failure”. Essentially, it’s about taking a painful experience, and changing it into something positive or useful.
A good example of this would be thinking about failure as a learning opportunity.
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
-Henry Ford
If you fail at something, you have basically learned one way in which not to do something. And the more you understand what not to do, the closer you will come to understanding the right way to do something.
In many ways, this is how many of today’s (and yesterday’s) most successful and famous people have come to enjoy such massive success in their lives. Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, J.K. Rowling, Sir Richard Branson, Steve Jobs (the list goes on and on) all have experienced a great deal of failures in their lives before succeeding. They used what they learned from these failures to move them towards achieving their bigger goals.
Let’s look at an abstract example of how failing can ultimately lead to success:
The Maze
Imagine you are stood in the middle of a maze that you are looking to escape from. You attempt to leave the maze, but on your first attempt, you reach a dead end. You retrace your steps and mark your route with chalk.
Whilst you failed in your attempt to escape the maze, you now know never to take that route again, which limits the remaining options you have. With fewer possible routes, your odds for successfully escaping the maze have improved.
As long as you don’t make the same mistake twice (and you won’t because you re-traced your steps and marked your route with chalk) then each attempt is taking you closer and closer to succeeding.
The important point here, is that whilst you are failing in your attempts, you are learning something from them.
If you chose to give-up escaping the maze after your first attempt, you would never succeed in escaping. However, through learning from your mistakes, remaing persistent and persevering, you can eventually escape.
Succeeding in life (at anything) is not about your ability to avoid failure, but it is about how you deal with it, and move on from it. In order to be able to do that, you need to change how you think about failure. Failure is not the end of the World, it is just an opportunity to learn and improve.
Changing responses to failure – Asking better questions
As part of reframing failure as something that is useful, it is important to change our focus and we can do that by asking a better quality of question.
After a failure, instead of asking:
“Why can’t I get this right?”
Try asking…
“What can I learn from this, and what should I do next?”
When we ask ourselves a question, we are almost forcing ourselves to come up with an answer, which changes the focus of our thinking.
With the first question, we are forcing our mind to come up with reasons/excuses as to why we haven’t succeeded, and why we are unlikely to succeed in future. It causes us to focus on our weaknesses, and negative thought patterns.
And to answer that question, our mind will work it’s hardest to come up with an answer, and find supporting evidence to support it.
The second question forces us to consider the failure as a learning experience. The second part of the second question forces us to come up with next-steps and actions as a result of what we have just learned. The focus is much more positive and forward-looking.
Prepare for the worst and hope for the best – Stop Catastrophizing.
One of the outcomes of a fear of failure is that we often do something called Catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is where we think (irrationally) things are much worse than they are.
As an example, if I made a mistake at work, I would often imagine that this would damage my credibility so badly, that I had put myself at risk of losing my job. This never happened, and the outcome was always much less negative than I had imagined.
To combat this, I would write down my worries, concerns, and all the things that made me frightened when I imagined certain situations.
I would then write down a more rational and realistic outcome.
For example:
Worry: I have made a mistake at work and will probably lose my job.
Response: Many people make this kind of mistake and worse. They have all kept their jobs. The worst case is I get disciplined from management. In any case, I should learn from the mistake and move on.
In some cases, I would even write “plan B’s” if I was very concerned about something.
I would also come up with “Plan B’s” in case the worst case scenario came true.
Instead of worrying about potentially losing my job, I simply noted down the actions I would take to find a new job. I was preparing for the worst in my head, and reassuring myself that regardless of the outcome, I am resourceful enough to make the best out of the situation.
Eventually, after some practice, I was able to do this without writing it down.
This is by far the toughest part of the process. We can never eradicate our negative thoughts or emotions, but if we work hard, we can effectively manage them.
Taking Action
Taking action is another hard part of this process. However, there are a few things you can do to make it easier for yourself:
- Write down a plan.
- Break down big tasks into much smaller steps.
- Start off slowly, and don’t try to do too much all at once.
- Do small tasks on a regular basis (getting yourself into the habit of taking action).
It’s also important to get into the habit of experiencing failure, and then taking action inspire of that failure.
It’s like building a muscle. The more you practice overcoming failure, the stronger that muscle in your mind becomes, and the better you get at it.
Take action, no matter how uncomfortable it seems!
Conclusion
When we talk about the fear of failing, or screwing up, we are talking about negative thought patterns that repeat in our minds. These thought patterns, like habits, build up over time, and can cause us to limit ourselves with our own thinking.
All habits and thought patterns can be very difficult to change (which is why addiction is so hard to fight), but it can be done.
Essentially, we want to try and isolate what “triggers” us to have these thoughts in the first place. Once we identify that “trigger” we then want to replace those thoughts with more positive/helpful thought patterns.
I have written a few posts on this topic now, and I hope you have found some of them useful. If you want to share your own experiences, or have any questions, please feel free to comment at the bottom of this article.
And finally, if you would like a quick-reference, visual guide to help you combat your fear of failure, then you can grab your copy of the Failing Forwards Guide, by clicking here.