THE FEAR OF FAILURE
1 MARCH 2022 (13 MIN READ)
“Fear of failure is a far worse condition than failure itself, because it kills off possibilities.” - Michael D. Eisner
The craziest part about fear of failure is that most of us don’t even realize we possess it; we have gotten incredibly skilled at masquerading the feeling behind intellectualization. What I mean by that is when your nervous system activates when you think about taking action on something, such as approaching a romantic interest, you immediately ignore that feeling through prioritizing one specific thought, such as: “I have no chance. They’re out of my league.” That one thought leads you to ignore the fear inside yourself by believing the story you tell yourself. Additionally, you become dependent on that thought to escape your fearful feeling consistently, permanently becoming that insecure story you tell yourself, leading you to never take action off that fear. However, there is one key problem with this strategy: unlike the stories in our mind, the stories in our body do not lie, and they hold the keys to the engine of personal progression. So, if we constantly refuse to listen to the whispers of our body and silence them with our ego in the form of thought, we will have a very hard time progressing as a person. In my opinion, a fear of failure isn’t exactly a fear of failing at something, it’s a combination of fearing confrontation with the pain inside of yourself, as well as a fear of the world seeing you in the way you currently see yourself.
In my own life, two key fields were rampant with fear that I repressed with insecure thoughts: academics and women. In terms of academics, I was one of the worst students in my class till I was about sixteen; nevertheless, I went on to graduate from an Ivy League college with a 3.95 GPA in my major. With regard to women, I went from getting bullied by attractive women in my teenage years to attracting some of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my twenties. What the fuck changed? Although puberty, health improvements, and social skills played a big role, the biggest step towards change was accepting I was scared shitless of failure and I did not want the world to see me for who I really was. I had to stop ignoring that feeling to create any change and refuse to listen to the insecure thoughts in my mind, tempting me to escape my body. I had to take action in spite of the way I felt. I had to understand I was still a scared kid vying for my mother’s love and my father’s approval. Finally, I had to release that energy from my body to become grounded into who I actually was in the present moment. Putting this into a four-step process, it would look something like this: acceptance, action, reflection, and release.
The rest of this article will tell my story with each step and how I went about working through it.
This is how you defeat the fear of failure.
ACCEPTANCE
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses.” - Carl Jung
The first step to any personal change is always acceptance, because until we reach that point, we are still in complete ignorance of our reality. This rule rings especially true for one’s fear of failure, since it’s so hard for us to accept that we are scared shitless about something because of our ego, leading us to unconsciously try our hardest to forget about it. Accepting that you are deeply scared of failing at something entails coming to terms with the fact that you are at the bottom of the hierarchy of whatever activity you stand in front of. For instance, if you are scared shitless of talking to a girl, then that probably means that you have not had much romantic success and you need to get to work to see any progress. Furthermore, there are tons of people out there who are way better at talking to girls than you. Accepting this reality of being at the bottom of a hierarchy is deeply troubling for the ego, since all it wants is to be greater than. However, if you want to get better at the thing you are so scared of, you must put the ego aside, because to be the master, you must be a fool to begin with. Even deeper, you have to be ok with being a fool. A lot of the fearful pain one feels is tied to the expectation of immediately being the master. We have a tendency to conceive some egoistic image of ourselves as an expert at something we haven’t even come close to getting good at. But if we accept that we are fools, then the fear becomes justified, and we can actually use it as a propellant to create progress.
Once we accept that we are the foolish dwellers of the lower hierarchy of a specific activity, we can use the negative feelings that come with that as motivation to reach the top. Previously, those emotions were tied to an image of yourself that you could not live up to. Now, they are connected to reality, meaning that you can sense their justification and be less hostile towards them. This lack of aggression towards your fear is what I like to call compassionate acceptance. Look at your fear with loving compassion and use it as a propeller to create change, almost as if you love yourself so much that you want to see yourself get rid of this pain. The energy of shame is retractive, meaning that once you tap into that energetic space, it will want to push you backwards. For instance, when that pit in your stomach arises when you want to approach someone attractive, and you shame yourself for feeling that way, you are more likely to cower back into your cave of fear. On the other hand, love is proactive, in the sense that you are more likely to correct something inside yourself if you treat it with love. In terms of my own journey with acceptance of fearing failure, here is my story surrounding academics.
Although I had gotten into an amazing college, my first-year grades were not too hot, leading me to want to improve things the following year. My father, even if I got a 99% all the way down to a 30%, would tell me to drop my ego and ask for help at any chance I could, attempting to suck in all conceivable information until I understood it as perfectly as possible. I always thought his advice was for nerdy pussies and not for a slick motherfucker like me, but man was I wrong. On my first big assignment of the new semester, expecting to have aced the test, I got an 81%, making me feel like the biggest loser of all time. For the following weeks, I became petrified of all my upcoming assignments, not wanting to have the same results as the previous year and wanting to impress my father. So, I looked at myself in the mirror and got real. After a lot of reflection, I realized that I was in way over my head and needed a huge amount of help to get to the place I wanted to go: straight A’s. In doing so, I accepted that I was the fool at the bottom of the hierarchy, having to claw my way up to the top. This mindset change of acceptance drove me towards taking the best actions I could have taken to reach my goals, consulting mentors, consistently going to office hours, reading educational books, and working ten times harder than most people in my classes. Through this inspired action, I eventually accomplished those goals, which I never could have reached if I did not accept the reality of the situation. Unfortunately, I shamed myself into this shift, which drove me into a dark hole, having to berate myself constantly for motivation. I will expand upon this in the third section, as it aligns with the objective of reflection.
TAKE ACTION
“Knowing is not enough! You must take action.” - Tony Robbins
At the basis of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), is the notion that one has to repeatedly expose themselves to their fear to get over it. Although this strategy is essential, it only covers one half of the equation; nevertheless, exposure therapy is an important step to take, which will get expanded upon in this section. (The second piece of the puzzle that CBT forgets about will be focused on in the next section). Now that we have accepted our position as the fool at the bottom, we can understand that our fearful feelings are justified and use them for motivation to get better at the activity they are tied to. In terms of shifting fear into motivation, at its core, fear is just anxiety, and anxiety is quite similar to excitement; thus, you can reframe fear as excitement in terms of making your way up the hierarchy. For me, I see fear as an invitation to master something that needs deep healing, which excites me at the prospect of eventually becoming a stronger version of myself and obtaining more success because of that. In action, this would look something like this:
The idea of flirting with a woman I found attractive literally felt similar to walking into a blazing fire. I honestly would have rather stepped into the fire. Any time the opportunity to flirt with a new woman presented itself, I would get this huge pit in my stomach and cower in fear. But once I acknowledged my position as the fool, I knew that I had to act on my fear to become skilled. Then, the moment came. An incredibly pretty girl seductively eyed me down, giving me the invitation to man up and go talk to her. I knew this was the moment and I was not going to back down. In that first step towards her, I felt as if I was walking towards a new version of myself, one who did not back away from fear, specifically surrounding women. With every step, I felt this version of me coming closer and closer. Once I got to the girl, I said some dumb shit and failed miserably, but that’s not the point. The fact that I acted against my fear in favor of my higher interest is all that mattered. The more I kept doing this, the more confidence I gained, and the more romantic success I obtained. After years of doing this, although I am in a relationship now, I have close to no fear of talking to any woman, no matter their status or what they look like. Thus, by consistently taking action in spite of my fear, I became the person I once thought was so out of reach. And in the process of doing so, I eventually realized that the real goal is not necessarily the outcome of the thing we are trying to get good at, such as attracting women, but rather, removing the fear inside of ourselves and gaining confidence in the process. The material things come and go, but gaining confidence in yourself is a permanent gift. So, we should stop viewing fear of failure as an obstacle to gain external success, and see it as more of an impediment to restoring confidence and trust in ourselves. Overcoming THAT roadblock is the real work. And by focusing on that, you actually give the external world less power, increasing your chances of getting the things you want, because you will not need them as much.
REFLECTION
“As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart.” - Proverbs 27:19
Although the acceptance step involves some level of personal reflection, this is an invitation to go even deeper. And going back to what exposure therapy in CBT gets wrong, is that removing fear is not only about taking action, what’s equally important is discovering what caused the fear in the first place. Through this investigation, you get to understand and love yourself at a deeper level, as well as understand and love people who have gone through similar pain. So, doing this reflective work not only benefits you, but it benefits the world at large, in terms of cultivating compassion. In terms of how to actually discover where the pain comes from, you have to allow the emotion itself to tell you a story. To do so, follow the historical trail of the emotion you are running away from. In my own experience, I always felt incredibly scared in moments of producing intellectual work, such as writing, especially when my brain was exhausted and functioning at a low capacity. This feeling would then lead me to be hard on myself, waste a bunch of time, and eventually give up, leading me to feel awful because I quit. I pondered about where this stemmed from, asking myself about where I initially felt this. I immediately got transported back to my classroom as a kid, where I was bullied for my learning disabilities and just wanted to make my father proud, but I never could because nobody believed in me as a kid, so I could not believe in myself. Thus, at the root of that trigger in the present moment was my inner child searching for love from his father. How can I be cruel towards that?
By understanding the root of your fear, which is almost always a young version of yourself in pain, it’s much easier to move away from a place of shame and towards a place of love. Before I understood this historical piece of my life, I would take action in spite of the way I felt, but I would shame myself into doing it, resulting in a terrible way of viewing myself. After understanding the root cause, I was able to love myself at a deeper level and actually work with the feeling, rather than against it. Researching my history brought me closer to myself, while blocking it all out just pushed me further away from my essence. Even better, by understanding my pain, I was able to connect with other people at a deeper level about their emotional journeys. And what’s more intimate and fulfilling than connecting over the intricacies of one’s life?
Even though you may now know what’s at the core of your specific fear of failure, that doesn’t mean you're done yet. That painful history that keeps plaguing your experience of the present moment comes with a lot of negatively charged energy. This loaded energy has to get released.
RELEASE
“Allow yourself to release the emotions you have struggled all your life to contain.” - Ellen Bass
The actual feeling of fear is a lingering emotion from your painful past. That feeling only goes away once it gets released. Now that you know where it stems from, which is a huge step in and of itself, put yourself back into that painful moment. I recommend clearing your head with some breathwork before you do so, making sure your focus is locked in and your mind isn’t attempting to escape. Put yourself back in the room that hurt you and make it yours. Become familiar with your senses and the specifics of the external environment; try your best to really feel what was inside your body at that moment. Next, let that shit loose! If you were incredibly angry in that moment, become that kid again and throw a temper tantrum. Don’t hold back! If you were holding a lot of grief, cry like you have never cried before. Whatever you restricted yourself from feeling then, take the barrier off now and let it all out. Within this expression, you should claim back your power from those who took it from you. If it was a teacher or parent—in your imagination, hold your younger self’s hand and guide them towards the authority figure, then let them say what they could not say then. Feel the power of that release and understand that you have now reclaimed that piece of history.
Through accepting the reality that you are a scared fool, taking inspired action against that fear, digging deeper into what caused the fear in the first place, and releasing that energy, you will own whatever it is that you were once running away from.
