Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vera Wang and Joanne Rowling, do you know what they have in common? They all failed at some point. All of them tested failure.
Starting a business is not easy and to achieve success you need to get out of your comfort zone, so you need to get used to the possibility of making mistakes. In short, the more things you try, the greater the chances of facing failure and mistakes.
As a popular saying goes: “Success is not final and defeat is not fatal: what really matters is the courage you have to keep going.” To help you take that step, in this article we share with you some keys and processes to overcome the fear of failure.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- What is the fear of failure?
- Consequences of fear of failure
- How do I know if I’m afraid of failure?
- 8 keys to reconsider the fear of failure
- How to overcome the fear of failure: 10 strategies
Fear of failure is a fear of not meeting one’s own and others’ expectations, or of making mistakes and errors. This disorder is known as atychiphobia and is common for it to occur intensely and recurrently, being a chronic condition that affects people’s lives.
In a natural sense, fear of failure is a feeling that makes people feel intimidated by new or unknown situations. And although fear is normal and part of our lives, it is important to balance it with other emotions. When fear prevents us from doing things, we are talking about a problem.
Consequences of fear of failure
If the fear of failure takes hold of you, it will be an obstacle that will prevent you from moving forward and, in the worst case, it can paralyze and slow down your entire life dynamic. This can lead to major problems in your career and personal development. Some of them are:
- Lack of judgment:The fear of failure can affect your analytical ability and cloud your vision when evaluating processes in a project or establishing relationships with clients. This may be because your goal is not to do things well, but simply to avoid failure at all costs.
- Loss of self-confidence:Atychiphobia causes people to magnify mistakes and feel like they can’t handle workloads. This creates a snowball effect, which will make you feel incapable of doing things and, therefore, more afraid of failure.
- Loss of trust in others:On the other hand, one effect of fear of failure is wanting to take on all the tasks necessary to ensure that a project does not fail. This can lead you to underestimate the capabilities of your team or to be unable to delegate responsibilities because you do not trust your colleagues.
- Unhealthy working relationships:High demands produced by an irrational fear of failure can create toxic relationships in the workplace. High competitiveness and fear of retaliation can lead to questioning of leaders and loss of work unity.
- Stress and anxiety:Another serious complication of the fear of failure is that it can lead to more serious illnesses such as stress, due to the demands and workloads, and anxiety, caused by intrusive thoughts.
As you can see, poor management of the fear of failure can have serious consequences for your professional life and the future of your company. That is why it is so important to work with it to overcome it. But first it is important to be able to identify it both in ourselves and in others.
How do I know if I’m afraid of failure?
Having thoughts about failure does not mean that we are afraid of failing. In many cases it has to do with an analysis of scenarios that are necessary to undertake a plan in a realistic way. On the contrary, the limiting fear of failure is distinguished by some symptoms and behaviors that you should be aware of:
- You avoid complicated tasks.This may indicate that you don’t want to face challenges that you feel you are not prepared for or that you think you will fail at. This can harm your professional future, as you do not allow for your own growth.
- You overcompensate.Because you feel that failure is a grave danger, you are likely to work overtime, go without sleep, or otherwise stay on your toes to cover everything that needs to be done. As you can imagine, this can backfire.
- You spend more time thinking than acting.Thinking isn’t bad, but when you spend more time thinking than doing things, it can mean that you’re playing out scenarios in your head that may be irrelevant, unlikely, or simply impossible, and that don’t let you continue with your plans.
- You are unable to come up with concrete solutions.This goes hand in hand with the previous point. When you can’t stop thinking about adverse situations, you may not have good judgment when making decisions. This can cause you to seek to cover more needs, increasing your expenses and delaying your projects.
- You require external validation.While working in a team is good, asking for approval from others to undertake a plan may mean that you do not have the capacity to decide or that, since you do not want to accept failure, you expect to blame others for the failure of a project.
Keep in mind that these behaviors do not mean that you are incapable of doing things or that you are not intelligent. In reality, the risk of failure is a matter of perspective. Therefore, it is desirable that you learn to see failure as an opportunity.
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8 keys to reconsider the fear of failure
Think that moments of failure can be:
- Helpful to improve your resilience
There are only two possible responses to mistakes and failure: you give up or you get up and try again.
If you choose the second option, you will inevitably become a more resilient person. Getting up after a defeat gives you confidence and the next time you make a mistake or fail (because yes, it will happen again), you will look back on this occasion and think: “I was able to overcome x , so I can overcome y .”
Rather than seeing yourself as the flaw or the failure, see yourself as a person who refuses to let bad experiences and failures hold him back; as someone who continually experiments until he achieves his goals and objectives.
- The beginning (and not the end)
We tend to think of failure as the end of an opportunity: a client decides to hire your competition, so you decide to close the deal and consider it lost, and move on.
End.
However, every mistake is actually an opportunity for a new beginning. Maybe you will meet that client again when the contract with the competition is about to expire, and then you can offer your services once again. That will be a new opportunity for them to decide to change and give your business a chance. Or maybe, this initial rejection experience will help you work on the differentiating characteristics of your brand and strengthen it.
Once you’ve improved your product and your business, you’ll find that you’ll start losing fewer customers compared to your competition. Think of your mistakes as experience, not as a finality.
- Proof that you took a risk
If you never try new things, you’ll never make a mistake. Failing shows that you’re ambitious. You might avoid picking up the phone and calling a potential partner, but if you let that opportunity pass you by, you’d never close a deal.
Ultimately, you should be proud of your mistakes because each one means you put yourself at risk of being rejected, but also of not being rejected and of growing. All you need to do is take a close look at your attitudes and make sure you don’t repeat your mistakes, because that’s not brave, it’s careless.
- A situation that helps you gain knowledge and experience
Being successful 100% of the time makes you overconfident, which can affect your ability to assess risks. As a result, you will make poor decisions.
Let’s say, for example, that your company has dominated your area of expertise for the past six months. Because of this, you decide to focus all your energy on a business opportunity with a client that needs five times the time you spend on a matter.
You believe that you are capable of doing business, even if the person in charge of sales management warns you that they may need a more consolidated state of the business to give full attention to this client and maintain current performance.
You decide to ignore this warning and when you are in the middle of the project, you realize that the productivity of the last quarter is much lower because you ignored the other clients in your portfolio in order to prioritize this last client.
Although you may think this mistake is very serious, having made it means that in the future you will be more careful so that you can work simultaneously with clients who require fewer resources and who show a greater probability of consolidating the business.
- Improving your deductive ability
Entrepreneurs rely heavily on their assumptions. Just think of the number of times you’ve made assumptions this week, from “this client isn’t serious” and “this client’s budget seems high” to “the deal with these clients is almost done” and “these other clients will probably get the most out of these two product features.”
Assumptions can help you make decisions faster and more efficiently, whereas comparing your previous experience with each new prospect would be unproductive. Either way, if you are operating with the wrong assumptions, you will need to find out as soon as possible in order to change your way of acting to adapt it to the real needs of each client.
Making a mistake should help you realize that one or more of your beliefs are wrong, so you can change them as soon as possible. For example, if you assume that small companies always go for a lower price, you might apply a rather high discount to a potential customer who might have been willing to pay full price.
However, as long as you learn from your mistaken assumptions and don’t repeat them, these mistakes will help you improve your deductive skills.
- Several small victories
Every time you make a mistake, you probably made good decisions along the way and can learn from them.
To illustrate this a little better, let’s say you misidentified a customer’s needs or the wrong features and benefits are listed on the samples you offer of your product or service. Of course you’ll be upset, but if you think about it, there are things you can do right in future trials for other potential customers, and all of them will have arisen from this mistake.
In future dealings you could then, for example:
- Get customers interested in engaging in dialogue with you.
- Gain their trust by offering them some additional value.
- Schedule a first contact call.
- Use an initial contract that guarantees a meeting of knowledge of both parties.
- Ask relevant questions to arrive at an appropriate testing arrangement that meets real needs.
As you can see, there is no way that mistakes can leave you without a gain or learning. Prioritize these gains if you feel insecure after a defeat.
- An opportunity to enhance your empathy
Making mistakes allows you to experience humility. You realize that you are not invincible: you have flaws and shortcomings, just like everyone else. This revelation may sound like a negative thing, but in moderation it can be a good thing. If you believe that you will never fail, you will have a hard time identifying with others. Therefore, when you are faced with problems, you will not know what reference to take, much less what to do.
Once your ego has taken a few hits, your empathy for others will skyrocket. This will not only benefit your collaboration skills but will also improve your leadership abilities. Great leaders can relate to the challenges faced by their team members. Empathy, without a doubt, is one of the keys to successful entrepreneurship.
- The sign that you are on the wrong path
Failure can show you that you’re on the wrong path before you’ve gone too far in one direction. Let’s say you try a new method of decision making. After this strategy fails with a few small clients, you decide to re-implement the old strategy.
That decision saves you from making a mistake with the next (much larger) client you’re thinking of approaching. Instead of losing one $300,000 deal, you’ll lose two $50,000 deals.
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How to overcome the fear of failure: 10 strategies
We have already shown you some of the reasons that can help you see defeat and mistakes as something positive. Now we present the following strategies that will help you overcome the fear of failure in your entrepreneurial journey.
- Become aware of what is your responsibility
Before planning and getting started on a project, you need to be clear about your role in its execution and in achieving results. Often, the failure of a project is not our fault; nor is it our responsibility to fulfill the functions of other people. When you know what you have to do, you will be able to do it well and, if appropriate, you will be able to support others.
There are also many situations in which we simply cannot do anything. For example, when the stock market crashes, when you are not approved for a loan, or, as we saw a few years ago, when we are subjected to new sanitary conditions. In these cases, no matter how much effort you put in, the failure of a project is likely to be imminent.
- Evaluate why you have failed
The best thing you can do to overcome fear of anything is to look at it analytically. If you feel paralyzed by a failure or a big mistake that was recently made in your company, stop and analyze the entire process in detail so that you can identify the exact elements that resulted in a negative situation for your company.
Analyzing will not only allow you to know which actions or strategies were incorrect, but it will also help you detect the strengths that your company has in terms of strategy, customer service and closing deals.
- Learn from your mistakes
To overcome fear, you need to look at the mistakes you’ve made, accept them, and take them as an opportunity to plan and implement compensatory measures. This will help you resolve the situation through an agreement that will allow you to regain lost trust (or gain it back, in the case of a customer who is just getting to know your company).
This is extremely useful because the strategies you create and prove successful can be used not only on this occasion but also on future occasions. Those in which, even though you have corrected the errors, you face similar situations, but which derive from causes beyond your control. External circumstances can often lead to scenarios in which a negotiation or compensation strategy will be your best tool.
- Think of realistic scenarios
If you feel like you’re consumed by the fear of failure and your mind is constantly thinking up possibilities for failure, try thinking of fewer catastrophic scenarios. Keep in mind that creating absurd worlds and possibilities won’t make you take things easy, but will create new worries and intrusive thoughts that won’t help you avoid the fear.
Even if this doesn’t lead you to propose a reasonable resolution to the situation, it will help lower your stress levels and will likely allow you to see the problem from a different perspective.
- Go to others for help, not fear
This is something you should keep in mind, especially if you are paralyzed with fear by failure (and not small mistakes) in a strategy or contract. If an entire strategy has a monumental failure and you are having trouble seeing the good in it, no matter how hard you try, it is advisable to seek the opinion of a trusted colleague or someone close to you who knows your work. Even ask your boss for it; don’t be afraid.
Listening to what they have observed in your previous work will help you reconsider this recent failure. It will allow you to look at it more calmly and proceed to an analysis that will help you understand the reasons behind this defeat. This will allow you to improve not only your mood, but also the next projects you have to get involved in.
- Build a good working methodology
Having a work protocol is one of the best ways to ensure that you are complying with everything necessary to achieve a goal. This also helps you not to panic and lose control of your emotions. If in the end you are not successful, you can have clarity on the process you followed to identify if there was an error in your management or if it was due to external causes.
Planning and creating action steps can even motivate you to establish what tools or strategies you can use to compensate for problems or mistakes that may arise in a given situation – from a client deal to your entire startup project.
- Set achievable goals
When you’re embarking on a business venture, acquiring a new client, or presenting a report to the board, you know exactly what you want to achieve. Yet setting a big goal for the future can make you feel fearful, and even more so, that failure feels impossible to overcome.
The best thing you can do is to break your project down into stages, parts or aspects to cover. As you progress, you will feel like you have succeeded in achieving many small goals, which will motivate you to give 100% in the last stage; even if you don’t meet the goal, you will feel like it wasn’t a complete failure.
- Speak from success
When you start a project, you have no certainty about whether you will succeed or not. So, if you are afraid of failure, it is also valid to be confident that everything will go well. All you have to do is change your focus: instead of thinking that everything can go wrong, think about the things you need to do to make everything go well.
Keep in mind that starting from insecurities can lead to a lack of confidence on the part of your team, cause people to not believe in you, and lead to a lack of motivation and hope that you will actually achieve your goals. Everything will be much easier if you stop punishing yourself for things that have not happened.
- When possible, start from scratch
This can be difficult, but in some cases it is advisable to start from the assumption that you are a novice at what you are doing (especially if you are). This attitude can be a great motivator to learn, make mistakes, and grow.
If, on the other hand, you assume that you know everything and that you have what it takes to succeed, you will not see failure as part of the learning process, but rather as an end that you do not want to reach. This is something that happens to perfectionists, who do not see failure as a step, but rather as a block on the path to success.
- Do things, even if you feel scared
When faced with fear, there is no better strategy than to face it head on. For example, you cannot lose your fear of riding a roller coaster without doing it. At the end of the day, it is that moment of challenge that allows us to begin to see what we are afraid of with different eyes.
As we have seen, fear is an integral part of our lives, so instead of avoiding it, we must risk coming face to face with it. Remember that courage does not consist in doing things without fear, but in doing them even when we feel afraid.
Finally, remember that practicing your emotional intelligence will help you master the fear of failure, as well as other emotions that often accompany it.