The fear of failure is something that everybody experiences at some point in their life. It can be at the beginning of a new task that you have been assigned at work. It can come as you start that new business that you have always dreamed about having. It can come when you start a new relationship.
None of us want to experience failure. It is embarrassing. It is painful. It calls into question our worthiness.
Somewhere along the line we learned to fear failing when we start new things. We certainly weren’t born with this fear. There is not a baby out there who is reading a technical manual at night on “How to Walk”. They just go out there and do it. They fall down a lot. They scrape knees and they bang heads, but they get right back up and go for it again and again and again. They don’t give a thought about what the adults in the room are thinking or whether the other babies are laughing at them.
Failure should be celebrated! Just like that baby we once were, we are learning every time that we fall down. In my humble, and sometimes right opinion, learning is what life is all about.
Failing is only a big deal when it stops us from pursuing our goals and go for those big dreams that will allow us to play big. If it stops us from accomplishing goals in our lives, then failure wins.
Some of the symptoms of severe fear of failure are:
· Low self-esteem/confidence
· Poor motivation
· Self-sabotage
· A feeling of worthlessness
· Underestimating our abilities
The fear of failure can be brought on by:
· A critical or unsupportive upbringing – we learn to believe that we cannot live up to family expectations and we fear making mistakes that could mean punishment
· Overprotective parents
· Growing up in a high stress environment/traumatic life experience/abuse/neglect
· Parents that are perfectionists and see any failure as unacceptable
· Learned helplessness – caused by being in a situation where you want to help your parent(s) but are too young to do it leaving you feeling powerless and out of control
The good news is that the Rapid Transformational Experience can help you to find and understand where these beliefs were created. Once they are found and understood with an adult perspective, they can be eliminated and replaced with powerful beliefs that will allow you to be more in control of new projects as they come into your life.
As soon as you finish booking your RTE session, you can start to work on some other ways to increase your self-efficacy:
· Learn new skills that will help you with that new task that you need to accomplish
· Redefine your idea of failure. You didn’t fail just because things didn’t work out the way you originally planned them.
· Quit worrying about what others think. That’s their problem.
· Identify and clarify thoughts, feeling and actions. Pinpoint the fear and how it may affect you so that you are prepared for when it arises.
· Focus on your strengths and talents. If you aren’t sure what they are, ask the people close to you.
· Give yourself permission to not only fail but to celebrate the failure and the learning that came from it.
· Break your projects into smaller tasks.
· Focus on the task at hand rather than on the negative self-talk going on in your mind.