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Getting over the fear of failure is a process that requires patience, self-reflection, and practice. Here are some strategies that can help:
Firstly, we can recognise that failure is a natural part of life and understand that failure is a common experience for everyone, and it doesn’t define your worth or abilities. Many successful people have faced failures along their journey to success. Practically every entrepreneur worth talking about knows failure far better than they know success, this is also true for every businessman who’s climbed from the bottom to the top!
The stress bunny!
I once worked with a young woman who was so frightened of failure that she took her work home with her, and did it in the evening after work. She worked relentlessly to do the company’s paperwork just right, working tirelessly to hit her targets, and in the process make the rest of us who weren’t willing to put in those sorts of hours look really, really, bad in the eyes of the management. They were pleased with her, and rightly so, she was giving them 16 hours work every single day, whilst they paid her for 8! The rest of us who were too tired after a hard and stressful day of commuting, working and striving, to do anything other than plonk ourselves on our couches, and watch TV couldn’t compete with her, because we weren’t being driven by her fear of failure. Fear can give you tremendous energy, it would appear! How do I know that she was in fact being driven by her fear of failure? That’s because she told us during a corporate training session in which we all had to put our worst fears on a post-it note which we then passed to the trainer who then dutifully put them on a white board for all to see.
For my note I drew a comical image of a spider, because I’m frightened of arachnids. I’ve spent 30 years overcoming this fear and now think that they are in fact beautiful, but predatory works of art, so, if you, like me are a sufferer of this atavistic fear, then don’t worry, there won’t be any pictures or clips of spiders in this video. I wouldn’t do that to you, because I don’t like it when it’s done to me, or sprung on me for clicks and likes! The point being, that a post-it note appeared on the board with the word ‘failure,’ written on it in girlish block capitals! ‘That’s a good one,’ said the trainer, who’s this one! Our heroine replied that it was in fact, hers!
Imagine being so frightened of failure that every single minute of each waking day is spent working for a shitty company that mysteriously went bankrupt after a fire a few years later, despite her best efforts to be a good and profitable employee!
The Laws of Physics, or life isn’t perfect!
We need to understand that failure is a natural part of life, and that’s because it’s baked into the laws of physics. There’s more ways for something to go wrong than there are for it to go right, and that means that failure is a more likely outcome for any endeavour. Entropy relentlessly chews away at everything which is why civilisation must be maintained! Things break, get worn out, and people get sick, simply because there’s more ways for something to go wrong than there is for something to go right. Ideals like perfection can only exist within the mind, they cannot be found anywhere else in objective reality or the material world that is made up of atoms and void!
Whilst important, mental constructs such as perfection and success are not objectively real. Let’s take a few moments to contemplate that we are real people, real beings, living our lives in the service of unreal standards! This should help us to reframe our perspectives! Instead of viewing failure as something negative, reframe it as an opportunity for growth and learning. Each failure can provide valuable lessons and insights that can help us improve and achieve success in the future. In other words, each time we try something, only for it to fail, we have in fact successfully learned one more way that things can go wrong. This means that in the future, should we try again, then we’re less likely to fail, because only an idiot makes the same mistakes over and over again in the hope of getting a better outcome as pointed out by Albert Einstein who stated: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” The previous quote is really well known, but it’s worth noting that Einstein had a lot to say on diverse subjects including success and failure, it’s less well known, but he also said this: “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”
Let’s end by taking a moment to consider the words of the great Stoic philosopher and emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius, who said: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” What Marcus was stating here, was that we do not have to agree with any mental states, stray thoughts or feelings that happen to enter our awareness. We do not have to give them our assent. We often judge ourselves far more harshly than others may do, and this is something that we can change at any time. So, let us take steps to become the masters of our own minds, to forgive ourselves, to learn from our mistakes and to determine our own worth.
