How to Overcome Your Fear of Failure

Many individuals tend to have a fear of failure. But, did you know that successful people fail many times on their road to success? In fact, achievers ‘love to fail’. When I first heard this, I was surprised. But, in due course, I woke up to the reason as to why they ‘love to fail’.

Each and every time they ‘fail’ they recognize that there’s a lesson behind their failure, which essentially makes them one step closer to success. So, it seems to me that they are successful every step of the way. Your success could be manifested in the present moment, or it could be ‘success that has gone a little astray’.

In this article, we will discuss how to overcome your fear of failure and use it as a motivator for success:

Learn to Love Failure

Many people tend to stop at the point of failure. Once they fail, they quit. As I said earlier, people love to fail because they will have learned something from the so-called failure. People call it ‘feedback’, I prefer to call it ‘success gone astray’.

Because this alleged ‘failure’ will undeniably bring you one step closer towards actual success. This supposed ‘failure’ brings with it a great opportunity for feedback. From this feedback, or response, you can discover why that approach did not work, and, in doing so, you have been fortunate at identifying a method that did not work, and you can put that method aside as one that you have successfully tested, and then you can move on to the next process that you can put to the test.

Take on board the fortunate attitude by viewing every action that doesn’t go your way as a learning lesson, as a lucky step forward. Learn all you can and move on to the next step.

Take Chances & Believe in Yourself

As soon as I wrote down my quarterly goals not that long ago, my immediate response was: ‘I don’t believe I could achieve this. Give it up.’ I found it very interesting that my reaction was of disbelief.

Many of us restrain ourselves from any chance of making any headway in our lives by believing, and being tied to the short, yet extremely powerful sentence: “I don’t believe”. We are held back by our limiting beliefs, so we remain where we are, stuck with no chance of progression. Be it in our professional or personal life, or perhaps in both.

What would happen if we ignored our disbelief and took action steps, even small ones, to, in time, overcome our disbelief? Do you think this way we can still go for what we want? Could we aim just that little bit higher and go for it? Sure we could. Sure you could. You could allow yourself to climb the ladder to overcome any self-limiting beliefs one step at a time.

Understand Your Fears

Have you ever wanted to start your own business, leave your current job, or ask someone on a date? You got excited, stood up all pumped and ready to go for it, only to freeze dead in your tracks at the last minute?

What stopped you? What stopped you from taking action on what you have been yearning for?

In one word – Fear.

What a horrible, life stalling, life sabotaging four-letter word FEAR is. We all feel it from time to time, and more than likely, under normal circumstances, we hate it with a passion. And when you feel fear failure, you do not feel confident. Your lack of confidence in yourself is high; you do not feel you’re up to the ‘challenge’, you feel weak, incapable, not good enough.

What you fear will appear!

I read this somewhere. What powerful words. Read it again.

And how about this one:

F – False

E – Evidence

A – Appearing

R – Real

If I remember right, we were born with two fears – fear of falling and fear of noise. The rest we made up as we progressed through life.

Don’t Fear “Fear”

So what do you do: do not hesitate. Do not focus on your fear of failure. Instead, focus on the great outcome that you want to achieve and go ahead immediately and do what it is you wanted to do. The longer you wait the stronger fear gets. Take action immediately; call that person you’ve been putting off, drive to the gym and sign up for their trial membership.

Walkthrough the fears that you created in your own mind and with your own thoughts. More often than not, you created that fear that doesn’t even exist.

By the way – you can work through some of your fears within you by learning more about limiting beliefs; those beliefs that stand in your way, such as I am not good enough to become a manager, I am scared to be rejected by her/him, I cannot make that presentation – they’ll laugh at me, and so on.

An important thing to remember is: Fear of failure kills self-confidence. Overcome that fear by taking immediate action.

Final Words

So step out of your comfort zone, expand on your talents, skills and abilities and challenge your limiting beliefs. Believe it is possible to achieve your goal, any goal. Build your self-confidence and go for it. When you muster an army of self-enhancing beliefs, why would you entertain the idea of settling for small goals?

Many people experience difficulties in life and keep on struggling to make ends meet. The mind gets filled with negative thoughts and the temptation to quit becomes a welcome sight. I think many of us know that for us to achieve more and to be high performers and achievers, we would want to be both active and highly productive in all that we do.