We don't fail. We feel a failure.
How do you know that you’ve failed?
Is it not getting first place? Is it when you forget to do something? Is it when you make a mistake at work?
Or is it getting first place but feeling disappointed that you didn’t reach your personal best? Or making a mistake at work which no-one cares about, but you feel completely ashamed because you ‘should’ have been able to do better?
Oprah told a class of Harvard grads - ‘‘There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.’’ Well, I call bullshit on Oprah, and if you know what it feels like to have failed, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Own the power of acknowledging failure
If we claim that failure doesn’t exist, we let it gain in power. By pretending it's only there to serve us, and ignoring how rubbish failing can feel, we learn nothing from it. Only by acknowledging how failure feels, can we begin to confront our fear of it and disarm it from holding us back.
Failure isn’t a thing that is done, it is a feeling. We don’t fail, we feel a failure. And often we feel ‘I am a failure’ rather than ‘I have failed in this specific instance.’
Last week I wrote about common experiences that Perfectionists have. In this post, I’m going to explain how these all link back to a fear of failure, and the negative emotion it brings.
People pleasing
Wanting to please people, is often driven by a fear of failing to be accepted, or failing to meet the expectations we think others have of us to be a certain kind of person.
A fear of what certain people think
If people think badly of us or something we've done, we’ve failed to meet their expectations of us. Or sometimes worse - if what they think reinforces our doubts and insecurities about ourselves, we’ve failed to do a good enough job of improving those things about ourselves.
Highly critical against unrealistically high expectations of yourself
Sometimes having unrealistically high expectations of yourself is driven by a fear of failure in itself. If you hold yourself accountable to a very high standard, then you’re (in theory) avoiding the negative feelings that come with failing. The difficulty comes when you don’t meet those expectations and have to face feelings of failure anyway, which leads to a cycle of self-criticism.
All or nothing mindset
We go all in because we fear how it feels to fail, so if you give it your all you’re more likely to succeed. Equally if you give it nothing, there’s no risk of failure because you didn’t really try.
Procrastination
We procrastinate because we fear failing at what we’re doing, so if we just don’t do it, there’s nothing to fear, right?
Fear is a feeling
We don’t fear failure as something that has ‘happened’. We fear it because of the feelings it brings us. If we don’t live up to the things I’ve mentioned above, we open ourselves up to rejection, disappointment, frustration, sadness and shame, and so to avoid having to deal with those emotions, we avoid the risk of failure altogether.
So what can you do about it? The first step is recognising the ways in which fear of failure is operating in your life and learning to deal with the negative emotion it brings. I’ll be writing some tips about how to do this in my next post, so subscribe to my blog at the bottom of this page to find out more!
