Have you ever struggled with fear of failure? Worrying “What if it doesn’t work out? What if I start this business and I don’t make any money? What if I quit my job to travel the world and I get homesick and have to come back? What if I apply to this job and get rejected?”
The threat of failure looms all around us and is a huge fear that keeps us in our comfort zones. Many of us have orchestrated our lives to avoid failure, and as such have created small, unfulfilling existences.
I totally get it because I have been there.
For the longest time, I struggled with my fear of failure and it kept me stuck, preventing me from getting my coaching business off the ground.
I wasn’t engaging on Instagram or inviting people to discovery calls because I was afraid they would say no, and that would count as a failure. I was terrified of any sort of rejection, because I counted that as a failure.
If someone said NO to a discovery call or NO to my coaching, I took it all as a personal rejection. I took these neutral events of some stranger on the internet not being interested in coaching, and blew it up to make it mean “I can’t actually make it as a coach” or “I’m not a good enough coach”.
Sounds insane right? But I’m guessing you’ve had similar experiences yourself.
Fear of failure is keeping you stuck
Because I was so afraid of this perceived rejection and failure, I felt stuck. I couldn’t summon up the courage or willpower to put myself out there on Instagram and invite people onto discovery calls. Because what if they said no and all my worst fears that I couldn’t actually make it as a coach were confirmed? It was better to live in the land of “I could be great if I really applied myself” than to actually take action and find out otherwise.
Essentially, what it came down to was, I was paralyzed by my fear of failure.
I invite you to reflect on this question as well. How is your fear of failure keeping you stuck? What are you avoiding doing? What risks are you avoiding taking because you are so afraid of failure?
Are you not reaching out to new clients or new leads online because you are afraid they will say no? Are you not putting your resume out there or applying for new jobs because you’re afraid you won’t get hired? Are you avoiding creating that art work or writing that fiction novel all because you are afraid it will be a flop, not well received by anyone?
I want you to dig deep and take a really close look at how your fear of failure is keeping you stuck. Once you realize how detrimental your fear of failure can be, when it comes to living your dream life, you will see how imperative it is to overcome it.
Why failure is necessary for success…
One day I read something in this book The Prosperous Coach that helped to shift my perception of the whole client outreach process and subsequently shift my fear of failure.
It said “Yes lives in the land of no”. If you are getting NO’s it means you are taking action, which means you are that much closer to getting a YES. If you aren’t getting any NO’s, it’s likely because you aren’t taking any action at all. And if you aren’t taking any action, how are you supposed to get a YES?
Do you see how that works?
Essentially what this means is that “failures”are necessary for success. If you aren’t “failing”, it’s likely because you aren’t taking action, or the action you are taking is so small and risk free that it isn’t leading to anything exciting.
Another quote I read that helped me begin to shift my perception of failure is from Katherin Zenkina of The Manifestation Babe. She said “When you work hard on avoiding failure, you work just as hard on avoiding success”.
This is powerful, because this is exactly what I was doing. By avoiding the “failure” of people saying no to me, I was also avoiding the potential success of people saying yes to me so I could grow my coaching business.
I’ve realized that when we are afraid of “failure” and afraid of taking messy imperfect action, we keep ourselves small and we never get started.
If we are going to actually start working towards our goals and dreams, we are going to have “failures”. We are going to have times when we don’t quite get the results we wanted. But these “failures” are not proof we are doing something wrong. They are actually proof that we are doing something right. They are proof that we are trying.
What if there was no such thing as failure?
Also, do you notice how every time I’ve used the word “failure”, I’ve used it in quotation marks. That’s because I am actually working towards erasing that word altogether from my vocabulary.
One of the presuppositions of NLP is that “there is only feedback- there is no such thing as failure.”
How freeing is that?
Here is what my NLP training course has to say about failure: how do you know something has gone wrong really? How do you know something shouldn’t have happened? You can only really know that on your deathbed looking back at the way the totality of your life unfolded. Most challenges are put there so we can experience and learn from them.
So if we treat each challenge as an opportunity to learn and grow- we can adopt a more playful attitude towards the whole thing. We can start to embrace our “failures” and hopefully one day erase that word entirely.
James Wedmore also makes a good point in one of his podcast episodes. He essentially says that whenever we label something as a “failure”, we lose the lesson. Which is so freaking true!
When I think about the moments of my life that I have labeled as a “failure”, those moments are so filled with shame that I tuck them into a tiny box and suppress them deep into my psyche. I can’t even bear to look at them, let alone revisit them and analyze them for a lesson.
So let’s release the word failure from our lexicon entirely and begin to think about all of these experiences where we didn’t get our desired outcome as simply feedback and a way of learning and growing..
How to reframe failures
And since this feedback is absolutely essential to our success, we must find a way to lessen the pain and scariness that we associate with undesireable outcomes.
We must reframe “failures” and setbacks as part of the process of learning and growing.
Here is a step by step process to reframing and ultimately embracing our “failures”. Get our your journals and let’s rock and roll.
Step One: Recognize and Name It
What failure are you afraid of right now? It is ok to be afraid of failure- we can absolutely work with that. It is when we hide and cover up this fear of failure that we aren’t able to make any real progress.
We must admit to ourselves exactly what we are afraid of. And a big clue that we are afraid of failing at something is that we procrastinate doing it. So to tune into what you might be afraid of, ask yourself “What am I putting off doing right now?”
One of my recent clients was trying to become a freelance copywriter, but was procrastinating her action assignment of applying to actual copywriting jobs.
Once we dug deeper we realized, the reason she was procrastinating was primarily due to her fear that she wasn’t going to “make it” as a freelance copywriter. Whenever you are telling yourself “I’m not going to make it” or “I’m not cut out for this”, those are signs that fear of failure is lurking in the corners.
Step Two: Get Specific, What Exactly is Failure?
Spell it out and define exactly what failure would look like. The term failure is far too broad and means different things to different people. So in this specific situation, what do you mean by “failure”? What exactly would that look like?
When working with my client, we realized that she was defining “failure” as applying to a job and not hearing anything back. It was a pretty stringent definition.
Chunking it down and getting super clear on what you mean by “failure” helps to take out all the ambiguity associated with the term. It also helps you see if you are setting completely unrealistic expectations for yourself.
Step Three: What Are You Making That Mean?
Usually the actual event we are labeling as “failure” is a neutral event, but the problem lies in the meaning we attach to failure. So it is very important to unpack this for yourself.
If you did “fail”, if the specific outcome you defined in step two did occur, what would that mean about you?
For the example with my client- the actual outcome of not hearing back about a job in itself wasn’t a big deal. She already had a full time job, she didn’t need the money. That particular outcome itself was fairly neutral.
The problem was the meaning she was attaching to the event. When I asked her the question “So if you did apply to a job and didn’t hear anything back, what would that mean about you?”
She replied: “It would mean that I’m a loser”.
Do you see how the meaning we attach to these events makes it so much more painful and scary. Getting clear on what we are making it mean is such an important part of releasing that meaning.
Step Four: Question and Reframe
Now it’s time to question and re-frame this perceived failure for what it really is. Our mind often times jumps to crazy conclusions and its up to us to take a step back and infuse some reality checking into all of this.
Ask yourself “Is this true?” “What would I say to a friend about this?” Often times we are kinder to our friends than to ourselves so stepping back and looking at it from a fresh perspective is a helpful way to re-frame.
I asked my client “Is it true that if you applied to a job and didn’t hear back it would mean you are a loser?”
She actually started laughing in that moment. Because when she heard her own train of thought in such plain terms, she could clearly see how absurd and insane it was to think that way.
I hope this post was helpful for you to start unpacking the way you think about “failure”. Because until we learn to embrace our “failures” and setbacks as lessons in our journey, we will remain paralyzed by fear of failure. Until we take a closer look and see the insanity in the way we are labeling these events in time, we will remain stuck.
Give this reframing exercise a try and see how it begins to unpack and untangle all of this “failure stuff” for the better.
I’d love to hear from you! What is your current relationship with failure? Do you avoid it at all costs? How is your fear of failure impacting your life or keeping you stuck? And how are you starting to re-frame your failures so that you can continue to move forward towards your goals and dreams? Leave a comment below and share!
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