3 ways to overcome the fear of failure.
We all strive to find some sort of success in life. Whether we have very conscious goals or unconscious goals, part of our innate human operating manual seeks to better oneself.
Of course, we experience many roadblocks on this path of our betterment and our evolution that lead us to question ourselves, our motives, and our abilities. This is completely natural because it is impossible to be 100% on your best game 100% of the time.
Inevitably, we experience failure.
We can easily become discouraged because of our failures. We experience how failure feels within our own selves, but more so we perceive how the failure affects oneself and others through mental stories. We re-run these stories of failure over and over again, each time created the emotional and somatic response to the failure that has already been lived.
Nobody desires this state of mind. Nobody.
So we begin to ask, “
How to overcome my fear of failure.
In all actuality, we do not fear the action of the failure itself.
What we fear are the conditions we have placed upon the task, and how we can perceive them to hurt ourselves and others.
In the act of failure, we are not concerned about the action, we are concerned about the repurcussions, the judgement, and the rejection that come from the failure.
Failure is guaranteed in any aspect of life.
We cannot control our success with a sense of permanence.
Overcoming your fear of failure is not achieved by any external circumstance, or validation, but rather overcoming the fear of failure is an inward journey that occurs through understanding a few key principles.
3 Ways to overcome the fear of failure.
The Three must know principles to overcoming the fear of failure all hang on your willingness to put in the mental and emotional work to transcend your fears.
In order to apply these principles to your life, you must realize that anyone can show you the path to healing but you must take the action to start down that path.
Success is an Inside Job
To fully understand this axiom, we must first separate from the outer metrics of success that we are programmed to believe. We have all heard the stories of “successful” people that still operate from a sense of something missing in their life, something disconnecting them from truly being content with who they are.
This is exactly the lesson.
Life is not about what you have done, It is about who you are.
It is about the identity that is unseen to the outside world, the identity that only you embrace from within the deepest part of yourself.
That part of yourself is where all of your fears life, while simultaneously is where all of your potential is stored.
To access that potential, one must go through one’s own fears.
There is no other way around it, literally.
Success is an inside job means that the metrics of how you view yourself, judge yourself, and approve of yourself are entirely within your own nature.
These views have undoubtedly been conditioned into you, but in this moment the lasting wisdom is that you have the ability to consciously observe how your perceive yourself.
Do you approve of yourself?
Do you feel like you will fail, even if you tried?
Do you feel like it’s even worth it to try?
These are the questions that are safeguarded by the inmost parts of being.
Once we begin to consciously view our inner dialogue, we can begin to shift those beliefs slowly but surely.
The key here is to forgive yourself.
Be graceful with yourself for all of the times that you failed, for all of the times that others made you feel like you failed, and for all the time you didn’t try because you were afraid of failing.
Success is an inside job because it is entirely up to you whether or not you choose to try. You always have the choice to believe in yourself, just as you have the choice to not believe in yourself.
Overcoming the fear of failure is akin to overcoming your limiting beliefs. You can check out the blog post on limiting beliefs here as well as an entire e-book I wrote to help guide you into overcoming your limiting beliefs that you can get here.
You are the gatekeeper to your own approval.
Only you can begin to create the belief that you can be successful from the inside out.
All of your reality is a merely an outer elaboration of that which lives within you.
The Subtle Art of Not giving a Fuck.
The truth is,
We have lived most of our lives being conditioned by what others believe we should be , how we should act, and who we can and cannot become.
We have unconsciously created this fear of judgment that is wrapped up inside of our fear of failing other people.
We begin to believe that our success or failure isn’t up to our own selves but rather to the approval and judgement of our parents, friends, and community members.
We outsource our own approval to others.
In doing so, we lose our power because we are giving our perception up to someone else.
You can check out a whole blog post on overcoming the fear of judgment here.
As mentioned earlier, when we consciously view our own inner dialogue we begin to gain the power of telling our own story. We have the freedom to tell that story in any way.
Similarly, we become consciously aware of when and where we outsource our approval to others, we can begin to bring that approval back within the self, slowly but surely.
The theme is to consciously observe what we have been unconsciously doing.
This transmutation from the unconscious to the conscious is how you overcome the fear of failure. This is where you reclaim, rediscover, and reconnect back to your true nature.
When you reconnect to this true nature, you gain access to your potential.
The problem is, we have spent so much time being afraid of what other people think of us, that the desire for outside approval stands between you and your potential.
The subtle art of not giving a fuck says to Hell with that.
Who the fuck cares if you fail.
Your failure may impact other people indeed, but the greatest impact will be felt internally within your own psychological construct based on the stories of judgement, worthlessness, and helplessness you choose to place upon yourself.
If you fail, no one else can make you try again except for you.
You are the owner of your reality which means if you try and fail, then you have just as much agency to try and fail again. The judgment you place on top of yourself is what spirals you deeper into your biggest fears.
How can you begin to experience failure without needing to judge yourself for the outcome?
What is the absolute worst case scenario of failure?
What does your biggest fear of failure look like?
Dive into the story of what it would be like to fail tremendously in life. Visualize all of it.
Who is impacted?
What does it mean for your life?
Is your life over?
Do People ever love you again?
Seriously, what is the extent of your biggest fear of failure.
Go into the fear now. When we visualize that fear we begin to see two things.
First, we see that the actually dramatic scenario of our failure is extremely unlikely to ever play out the way we envision it.
Second, we see that life will go on.
From here we experience choice architecture.
How would you like to choose to carry on your life given you just failed tremendously? You have complete and total freedom to write your story after that failure; after all you just experienced your greatest fear of failure so by universal law that worst is over.
By going into the story of playing out our greatest fears we see that we have much more agency over our lives than we are led to believe. After that hypothetical failure is over whom do you wish to be?
What this reveals to us is that we always have a choice. We always have the choice to try again, and we always have the choice to cultivate our inner dialogue even after our greatest fears play out.
When you play out the worst case scenario, you realize that know you have the power to believe in yourself so that you can try to avoid that worst case scenario. After playing out the scenario in your mine, you can strategize how you can become your best self and put your best foot forward to counter your fear of failure to cultivate success.
You see,
Failure and success are measures of the same thing but to differing degrees. Failure is a measure of success to some extent just as success is a measure of failure or lack thereof.
Can one side be bad and one side good if they are the same thing?
You cannot eliminate failure entirely in the same light as you cannot eliminate success. They are but the same idea expressed to different degrees.
To fear failure simultaneously means to fear success.
If you limit your potential failure, you limit your potential success. The problem we face as mental beings is that we become attached to our stories of our fears of failure yet remain unconscious of how this affecting our potential success.
Overcoming the fear of failure is congruent to allowing yourself to experience success.
Are you allowing yourself an opportunity to feel successful at all, or is that opportunity shut down by fear before it even began?
“The sweet spot of desire occurs at a 50/50 split between success and failure.”-James Clear from Atomic Habits.
so
“How do i overcome the fear of failure”
Overcoming the fear of failure is how you uniquely combine the discipline of self-mastery in regards to the view of self.
To summarize, this process begins with the understanding that success is an inside job. Separating from the outside metrics of success so that you can observe the inner metrics of success defined by your inner dialogue is critical to begin the process of overcoming the fear of failure.
Secondly, not giving a fuck what other people think of your successes and failures is the gateway to focus on how you can best learn to give yourself approval. When you have your own approval you feel worthy to try in life. When you feel worthy to try you being to feel confident enough to fail yet try again.
Lastly, when we dive into our worst case scenarios about failure we learn how unrealistic the reality of that story is. More importantly, it is revealed to us that we have much more power and agency in our lives to believe in ourselves so that we can potential change that story.
We learned that success and failure are but the same thing, and that to limit your failures is to limit your success. With this understanding we now have the right tools in the toolbox to shift our world view, our self-view, and access more the potential that lives within us that has been locked up by our fear of failure and judgment.
There is no one stopping you from becoming your best self but you.