A person must be prepared to face failure to overcome the fear of it. The right mindset minimizes the fear of failure and puts it into perspective. While the fear of failure is a part of achievement, overcoming the fear requires understanding what failure is and how to learn from it.
The steps to prepare for fear of failure are:
- Redefine Failure
- Find Benefits from Past Failures
- Understand Threats
- Create Approach, not Avoidance Goals
Redefining failure can change a person’s perception and fear level. Industry leaders in Forbes business magazine suggest that redefining failure as learning opportunities helps overcome fear.
It would not be failure if a person learned something useful from experience, even if what they discovered was that they didn’t have the right plan to succeed.
Psychologists suggest redefining failure as discrepancies, or simply times when outcomes didn’t meet expectations. When failure is defined in less personal terms or as learning experiences, there is less to fear.
To redefine fear, a person should look to their past failures and consider the benefits they received during those times. Learning a better way, discovering a new path, and realizing a plan didn’t work all provide benefits to overcome the fear of failure in the future.
When a person uses the information and experiences they gained from previous failures, they have less to fear because they already know what to avoid.
Humans perceive failure as a threat. Because failure stops people from reaching their goals, they see it as a threat to their desires. Scientists at the University of California Berkley concluded that when people perceive a threat, their bodies prepare to fight it.
Physically, a person’s breathing and heart rate increase and they go into “fight or flight” mode. Preparing to fight is negative stress on a person’s body and mind and can cloud their judgment, increasing their fear. These scientists suggest that a person should view failure as a challenge, not a threat. By viewing failure as a challenge, a person can calmly and logically think through the problem and find a way to overcome it, decreasing their fear response.
To redefine a threat as a challenge, a person needs to visualize the obstacles they face. They need to determine if their fear is based on a real or imagined threat. People often fear failure because they think of the worst-case scenario, instead of focusing on positive ways to reach their goals and avoid failure. Facing a challenge holds less fear than facing a threat.
Once a person has redefined failure, the next step is to create goals that approach success, not avoid failure. Approach goals focus on positive outcomes: learning something new, achieving a level of success, or growing to fill a need. Avoidance goals focus on negative consequences: not freezing up during a presentation, not missing a deadline, or not falling short of a quota. Approach goals provide positive reinforcement while avoidance goals create fear of failure.