Issue 31: Fear Of Failure
THE LEAP
BY QUANTUM ORANGE
GROW, EXPAND & EVOLVE
ISSUE 31 | FEAR OF FAILURE
Each week The (Quantum) Leap summarises a key aspect of success into what you need to Think, Feel and Do to create a personal shift.
Failure can become our most powerful path to learning if we’re willing to choose courage over comfort.
~ Brene Brown
THINK
Most people have a totally warped relationship with failure.
Why?
Because we personalise it. We say, ‘I am a failure’ rather than, ‘I failed at that thing the first time I tried’. When we do, we link the failure to our self-worth and all sorts of trouble follows.
In truth, failure is an incredible teacher if we can get comfortable enough with it to sit down and listen.
The fear of failure is not always easy to identify. It can produce emotional and behavioural issues like anxiety, avoidance, feeling a loss of control, helplessness and powerlessness, as well as many physical problems like difficulty breathing, muscle tension and increased heart rate.
In Rising Strong, Brene Brown suggests one big problem we have is our unwillingness to sit with the pain of failure in relation to the stories we tell ourselves - stories that are largely full of assumptions we make based on our beliefs, fears and insecurities. These stories reinforce our beliefs about ourselves and the world but don’t help us to avoid the same failures in the future.
Although we may not always be fully aware of our fear of failure, we can easily unearth what drives our fear of failure: our beliefs, attitudes, and past experiences that may have made us more failure averse.
Bring to mind a time when you didn’t achieve something you hoped you would and ask yourself the following reflective questions:
- Did you think you lacked the skills or knowledge to achieve it?
- Did you procrastinate to the extent that it affected not only your ability to get it finished on time but also your performance?
- Did you tell other people that you would probably fail so their expectations of you remained low?
- What stories did you tell yourself about this failure?
- Looking back, what did you learn about yourself from this experience?
FEEL
Our relationship with failure can be quite traumatic: because we personalise it, we feel ashamed and keep it a secret due to the erroneous conclusion that if others find out they will think less of us.
Bring to mind another experience of failure and look deeper:
- Did you feel that your imperfections or shortcomings would make other people think less of you?
- Did you feel you disappointed others because you failed?
- Did you feel shame or embarrassment about not achieving things you hoped you would?
- Do you feel that you have lost faith in yourself or your abilities as a result of this failure?
DO
You can choose to consider failure a debilitating setback or you can, as John Maxwell suggested, fail forward. That is, you can turn the failure in to a great big tragedy or you can learn from it and let it go.
Research suggests that the key to using failures as a stepping stone on the road to success is owning them. Put simply - acknowledge where you went wrong, apologise if you need to, look for the lesson and move forward.
Here are four ideas you can action this week:
- Examine your attitudes towards failing. If necessary, remind yourself that without failure, there is no learning, little development and very few new experiences.
- Fail ‘mindfully’ by engaging in a new hobby or learning a new skill - doing so will train your failure muscle in a fun way.
- Adjust your mindset by emulating successful people who failed many times before they succeeded. Remember Edison’s famous words in developing the light bulb: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
- View your failures as teachers: ask yourself, ‘What is the lesson here? What can I do better next time?’ Record these lessons in your journal, if you have one. JK Rowling said, “Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.” (More from her on the link below!)
To lessen the fear of failure even further, identify the consequences of failing you are most frightened of and focus on building your confidence in dealing with them.
Ask yourself:
- What are the consequences of failure that scare me the most?
- How much impact will they have on me?
- How quickly will I move on?
- How well can I handle them?
- How can I enhance my ability to handle them?
Once you know you can deal with the consequences of failing, you will be unaffected by the dear of failure.
Learning to fail gracefully leads to more resilience, new business ideas, creative genius tapped, relationships deepened, and a life crafted according to the dreams you had the guts to chase despite the odds.
Read. Watch. Listen.
