Fear of failure stops many people from living the life they really want to live, and becoming the person they’d like to be. They fear the emotional pain that they have chosen to associate with failure. This is sad on so many fronts, but let’s not dwell there. Instead let’s jump straight into the first part of overcoming this challenge (which is what most people are really interested in).
When most people work to deal with the ‘fear of failure’, they focus on the wrong part of the problem. They decide they’re going to eliminate, or reduce as much as possible, the failure part. BIG MISTAKE! Because the only way you can eliminate failure (or mistakes or ‘negative’ outcomes) is to do nothing! More importantly, they have an inaccurate understanding of failure. This is especially true in the current U.S. culture.
Many people believe that success and failure are opposites – with success to be desired; and failure to be avoided (feared) at all costs. But that’s not an accurate view of failure at all. Success and failure aren’t opposites. Instead they are both required components of achievement or accomplishment. (Therefore, they aren’t ‘opposites’ any more than a nut and a bolt are ‘opposites’.) Different activities or accomplishments simply have different ratios of success-to-failure. Success moves us forward toward accomplishment. Failure allows us to learn and grow so that we can accomplish more in the future.
They key here is to be growth-oriented, not simply goal-oriented. When we’re goal-oriented we create a situation where we either achieve the goal or we don’t – we win or lose. But when we’re growth-oriented, we either grow (win) or don’t (neutral). So being growth-oriented no longer makes everything a win/lose scenario.
On a related point, people also tend to fear ‘the unknown’ (or more accurately that they might ‘fail’ in an unknown situation). Well, once we become growth-oriented we’ll actually look forward to the ‘unknown’, because that’s actually the only place we can grow. Since the ‘known’ is, well, already known.
So the goal shouldn’t be to eliminate failure, instead it should be to eliminate or reduce, or reframe the fear. (Which is what part 2 of this article will cover.)
To learn more about the value of failure, ask me about the upcoming Mastermind Group on John’s latest book, “Sometimes You WIN Sometimes You LEARN” That starts in January 2014.
