The fear of failure is something a lot of people can relate with in life. At definite stages of your life, especially at the beginning of every phase, there will always be that voice within you questioning your abilities, questioning your dreams and making you feel less competent about what you want to do. That inner voice will make you afraid and make you think of what people would say, and it has caused many people to abandon their dreams and goals.
The fear of failure is real, but it’s only as real as you let it.
These are 5 important things to do when the fear of failure is holding you bound.
1. BUILD A POSITIVE PERCEPTION ABOUT YOURSELF
If you rate yourself lowly and see yourself as a failure, then the fear of failure will forever hold you bound in life. To conquer that fear of failure, you must feel free deep within; you must see yourself in positive light and think right about yourself. The battle to conquer the fear of failing starts in your mind.
2. ALWAYS SEE FAILURE AS A LEARNING PROCESS
Take success to be like riding a bicycle. As simple as riding a bicycle could be, you don’t just learn it once; you try and fail and fail and fail until you master the techniques of wheeling the bicycle and being balanced at the same time. When you finally learn how to ride that bike, it’s upwards from there — it becomes so easy for you that you forget how hard it was and how many times you fell. But it’s in that process of falling and trying again that made you learn how to ride a bike. The people who fell and never tried again never learnt how to ride a bike.
So see failure for what it really is — a learning process. As Robert Allen will put it: “There’s no failure. Only feedback.”
3. FEED YOUR MIND WITH POSITIVE THOUGHTS
Your mind is a very powerful tool, and it plays a huge role in making you successful or not. Feed it with the wrong food and it’ll give you wrong results, but if you feed it with the right food it’ll give you the right results. Listen to positive messages everyday, surround yourself with positive people and speak positive things to yourself. Don’t give that fear of failure a chance to speak wrong things to you.
4. VISUALISE WHAT YOU WANT
Don’t let today’s challenges block your vision and make you think only of the short-term. Visualise where you want to be, who you want to be and where you are going. This will give you the energy to always continue and to try again even when you fall.
5. TAKE ACTION
All these tips will be useless if you don’t take action. Gain useful knowledge about that thing you want everyday, no matter how little; it’s in those little bits of knowledge that you become really knowledgeable. And then work like you have never failed, and work like you’ll never fail. Always have the habit of work and taking action.
According to William D. Brown: “Failure is an event, never a person.”
Jake