My-Improvement.com

Whenever you attempt to achieve a goal or make a change in yourself or start something that is totally new, one of the most important ingredients is the belief that you can succeed at what you are trying to accomplish.

You may have the desire to succeed and the skills to do the job but if you really don’t believe you can succeed you will probably never attempt it in the first place.

This is basically the Fear of Failure.

Fear of failure is one of the most common fears that stop people from setting and achieving goals. It even creates difficulty for them to try for goals which they can attain. Fear of failure, more than any other fear, cause people to accept mediocre lives. They believe the risk of failing is worse than the victory of success.

People who operate with the fear of failure don’t set goals because they believe if they don’t ever set goals, they can’t fail by not achieving them. In this way they never set their target higher than what they’re sure they can successfully perform. And this is usually no further than what they’ve already accomplished. These people are plagued with the feeling that they could be so much more and they are just wasting their potential. But the fear they have keeps them from trying anything that even resembles something they might not achieve.

If a person actually gets started on the project but internally harbors a belief they will not succeed, they will quit at the first sign of difficulty. We see this everywhere in life. How many people do you know have started something and quit when confronted by their first obstacle? Gyms across the country are filled with names of people who joined and never made it past the first month.

Another point I’d like to touch on is self fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you can succeed you will see more opportunities to succeed because that’s what’s in your attention field. Even setbacks will seem like opportunities for your success. On the other hand, someone who believes they will fail will miss opportunities and will translate anything that even closely resembles a setback as failure. They will then quit and say, “See, I knew this would happen.” Their thoughts and actions will be in line with failing and they will ultimately get what they are asking for.

I used to frown at the concept of fear of failure until I took a really close look at it and what it actually is. I discovered that I have this fear and it shows itself in any project that stretches me past my comfort zone. The most insidious part is that it comes through in very subtle ways - always disguised as something other than the fear it is.

Here are a few ways the fear of failure has shown up in my life:

• Never Setting Clear Goals - I never set clear goals that I was working on achieving. I can say that I achieved many things in my life, but I never really set a concrete goal and worked towards achieving it. I can see I never set them so I wouldn’t be held accountable if I failed to reach them.
• Setting up goals in secret - Whenever I attempted to quit smoking I always did it in a vacuum. I never told anyone my intention and I realize now that I did this because I wanted to leave myself a ‘back door’ of escape. If I didn’t tell anyone and I didn’t quit smoking, the only person who would know would be me. I wouldn’t look like a failure in someone else’s eyes.
• Procrastination - I will keep myself busy on the project but I’ll find myself only doing the parts of the project that I know I can accomplish. I keep putting the more difficult assignments on the backburner and fill my time with tasks that may not be as valuable to finish. When I catch myself doing this I have to stop and force myself to work on the tasks I’m avoiding. This makes me face the fear head on. As you do this more and more the power of the fear diminishes. Every repetition of going through the fear weakens it a bit more until it no longer holds sway over you.

So if you find yourself: never setting goals; secretly setting goals that you aren’t sharing with others; procrastinating on difficult areas of your projects, you may be suffering from a fear of failure. Of course the above list isn’t exhaustive or meant to be all inclusive. It’s just some major ways in which I’ve had to deal with my own fear of failure.

To Overcome Fear of Failure

Quick Solution - Take it to the extreme. Imagine the worst case scenario coming true. Then ask yourself, “So what. What then?” Continue chasing it down until you can imagine the worst case scenario. When you see this it often isn’t any big deal. It turns out the fear is far worse than what would actually happen if the worst case scenario happened.

Long Term Solution - Reframe your definition of failure from something that is negative to a positive experience. This method takes more work but once you get it to stick you won’t be dealing with fear of failure as often. Failure is as much a part of achievement as success is. It’s very rare for someone to succeed their first time out without having any setbacks or failures. The thing that separates success from failure is the perseverance to continue until the goal is achieved.

A quick example of overcoming fear of failure before I close:

I watched my thought process as I attempted to write this article. I am fairly new at blogging and I believe I don’t have a tremendous amount of writing talent. I do know that I have a large base of knowledge in personal development because I have been improving myself for a few decades now and have a pretty extensive background in it. This made for an interesting mix of can-do and fear of failure.

“What if the article stinks. What if I can’t properly write what I’m trying to say? What if everyone who reads the article hates it? What if they all comment and say my writing skills and the content of the article really stink.”

I took it to the extreme and imagined all of things came true. So what? What’s the big deal? Even the worst case scenario would only get me to work on my writing skills more. ‘Failing’ would be no big deal.

It turns out failing doesn’t have to be a negative thing. It can be used as a springboard for improvement.

Related Articles

• Redefining Failure
• Do You Really Need Another Self Improvement Program?
• Simple Is Best
• My First Post
• Taking Action

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 10:52 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.