Overcoming the Fear of Failure
What stops most people moving forward with their life? The fear of failing – just the thought that you might make a mistake, you may get it wrong or you might fail, can stop people even trying something new. It’s not the fear of failure it’s the fear of criticism and rejection that people fear the most, which means if you didn’t fear the thought of criticism or rejection, what you can achieve is unlimited.
Successful people make mistakes (like the rest of us) but they don’t see a mistake as a failure but see the mistake as feedback, a learning curve a chance to move forward.
Unsuccessful people limit themselves and only achieve a fraction of what they are capable of achieving, because they are scared that they will fail – they feel they will be criticized.
This article will help you overcome fear and to gain your goals.
How you view future events in your mind
When you think of trying something new you will make a visual representation of this event in your minds eye. This image, you will create will either be positive (you will see yourself being successful) or negative (you will imagine yourself failing) which will result in you FEELING positive or negative.
If your negative feelings are strong, you will often make the decision not to complete this task.
To overcome this, when you think of a negative image/future event in your minds eye, change the color of this image to black and white. If the image is more like a film, pause the film and make it into a stilled picture. Put a big frame around the picture and slowly move the image away from you, further and further away so the picture becomes smaller and smaller – how do you feel now?
As you change the submodalities of the image you will also change your emotional response to the image – you won’t feel negativity or fear. You will need to complete this exercise 2-3 times.
Without fear will you be more willing to “give it a go” and once you start trying new activities you will get new results.
Keep Going
You need to be persistent, when you want to make a real change to your life. If you want to be successful you will need to look at different ways to achieve your goal. Some ideas will work and some wont, the trick here is to never give up and after each activity ask yourself what have I learnt from this experience? Remember if you carry on doing things in the same way you will get the same result.
An opportunity to learn.
When making any change you will make mistakes, think of any failure as a learning experience. What did you learn from the experience that will help you in the future? How can you use this experience to improve yourself or your situation? What could I of done to prevent the mistake? What will you do differently next time? What has been good about making this mistake – what have I learnt?
If you enjoyed reading this article you will also enjoy reading:
6 Replies to “Overcoming the Fear of Failure”