How to Overcome Fear of Failure

• Things that your fear of failure may be blocking you from and why it’s important for us to release those blocks 
• A new way to look at failure 
• 4 tangible ways that you can immediately apply to your daily life to overcome your fear of failure

“Too often, we think failure is something so big about ourselves, we make it mean something about us personally.” 

“Failure is the best freaking teacher in the whole world. I promise you. Failure is an incredible teacher. Some of the biggest, most monumental things that you have learned in your life have come from failure.”

“What’s happening for some of you is you are so afraid of failure, you’re not giving yourself a chance to learn the lesson. You are so attached to being successful or good or doing it right, that you’re not giving yourself space and room to grow.” 

“The more things you have in your life that bring you joy, the easier it is to handle hard things. The more things that bring expansion and fun into your life, the easier it gets to be resilient in the face of challenge, in the face of things that aren’t going exactly your way, like failing.”

NICOLE

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the School of Self-Worth. Today I get to dig into one of my favorite topics ever, Fear of Failure. 

This is a big theme in the conversations I’ve had in the last couple of weeks, including with author Kristi Coulter. It felt like one that really deserved its own episode. So talking to Kristi about the moment she felt like she failed at her job at Amazon reminded me of how subjective failure is. And at the same time, we make it this all-consuming, super-deep thing that can run your life and actually leave you pretty paralyzed. Fear of failure can actually stop you from following your intuition and stepping into a life you’re really excited about and feel really fulfilled by learning to navigate your feelings around it.

Failure literally is a major life skill and it’s something that, if you have kids, you’re probably trying to teach your kids. And when it comes to you, when it comes and takes over, it actually probably is something that you struggle to move through. It can be super hard to shake, and it actually also becomes a way we start to avoid doing things that you’ve never done before. It’s how people end up staying stuck in relationships, in jobs, in areas of life where you’re not actually even feeling very happy or connected in, and yet you’re still doing it because fear of failure keeps you in that same ‘safe’ place. The truth is, humans are not wired for that. Humans are wired to expand and to grow. Humans are wired to explore, to adventure, to try new things, and to break into new territory for your mind. So that is why understanding and overcoming fear of failure is actually so important.

Today’s episode is really designed to dedicate and help you to release those blocks that are getting in the way of you doing something that’s brand new to you. So, let’s dig into four simple ways to overcome fear of failure.

Here is the first way: Stop making failure about you. Maybe you had a time when you failed a literal test as a kid. We all did. And that may have cemented in your head that you were a failure. You started to define yourself as a failure when the truth is, the only thing that actually happened is you failed a test, so you failed a thing. When you’re an adult, there are not a lot of tests. We don’t have that many tests. And there is this perception often that we’re failing. This is where you want to start to look at what’s going on because sometimes you don’t get the job. Sometimes, somebody breaks your heart, and it’s still just a perception that you failed because if you are not getting the job or you are getting broken up, which actually leads you to the life you’re supposed to lead. But in our human brains, we get really attached and we think it has to be a certain way. I’ll give you a personal example of this:

So back in the day when I wanted to leave the newspaper, it was totally time and I was looking for jobs, but I really didn’t feel like I could find any job that I was going to love as much as I loved being a reporter at that time. So, I was hunting around and found a job that I was really excited about, and I interviewed for, and became a finalist, and I was so excited – except the other finalist was one of my closest friends at the newspaper. As you can imagine, I felt pretty torn about the situation. But I still really wanted to get the job. It felt like the perfect job for me. Guess who got the job? She got the job. And I literally thought I was going to die. Like, I was crying….”I’m never going to get out of here. I can’t figure out my life. I am a failure.” I actually really felt like I was a failure. And now, looking back, I can credit that moment. It was a really big turning point for me because I decided at that time to try to be a yoga teacher. And I can go back and look, and credit that moment of becoming a yoga teacher, and leaving the paper to teach, which led to my three books and becoming a coach. Thank God I didn’t get that job!

That job was not the job for me. It was not the job that was going to serve my life. But at the time, it would have diverted me from my calling if I had actually taken it. And now I am so glad I did not get that job. I am so glad I “failed in that situation.” But this is the truth – too often we think failure is something so big about ourselves, we make it mean something about us personally. Like, I definitely made it mean that I wasn’t qualified for the job, that they were making a mistake, all kinds of things. But the truth is, that particular experience was one of the most important things that could have happened to me at that time.

And that leads me to the next most important thing to understand and to know about failure, to help yourself overcome it. Failure is the best freaking teacher in the whole world. I promise you. Failure is an incredible teacher. Some of the biggest, most monumental things that you have learned in your life have come from failure. The failure of a relationship. Has anyone not learned from relationships? And if you’re curious about it, go back and listen to my series on ‘Dating after Divorce’.

There is failure of jobs. I just gave you an example of that. Losing a job, not getting the job, that you wanted all of those things, it could be the failure of a season of your life. Like the time of life has changed and you might have felt really challenged coming out of it. I know this occurs for people in so many seasons around being a parent, around changes in your life, moving cities, like so many places where you can feel like, ‘Why did I just not stick it out? Was I not resilient?’ But failure, honestly, is the best teacher that I know. And while I’m not someone who would say I’m excited for failure, I also am okay with it, because I understand that I am going to get a lesson on the other side. And this is going to be an important lesson, a lesson that I need to learn at that time in my life. 

What’s happening for some of you is you are so afraid of failure, you’re not giving yourself a chance to learn the lesson. You are so attached to being successful or good or doing it right, that you’re not giving yourself space and room to grow. And if you want to grow in this life, I promise you, you are going to do things that fail. Like, no question about that. The question is whether you are willing to give it a whirl if you are willing to try and give it a chance to see if you’re actually going to take that lesson. I have really strengthened this over anything. Anytime something happens where it feels like something is failing in my life, I’ve really learned to be like, ‘Okay, Nicole, what is this lesson you’re going to learn?’ And I have learned to really make that bounce back in my mind very quickly. I do not wallow in failure. I do not sit around being like, “Oh, my gosh, boohoo me.”

Instead, I use it as an opportunity to see what the lesson is. So if you’re not doing this, now is the time to start. To say, “Okay, am I making fear of failure about myself? Could I actually learn to take failure as a teacher, as a place for me to learn and to grow in this lifetime?”  And if you haven’t done that yet, this brings me to the third way you can start to learn to overcome failure, and that is to fail on purpose. That’s right. I want you to start purposefully trying to fail. And I’m really serious about this. I want you to look at it from the way of failing at small things. What we often do is, fear of failure comes up around something we’re really attached to, like changing a career or changing relationships, if you’re looking to end a relationship or move on from a relationship, where you might not have ended it. We start getting super attached. We want it to be good. We want to be like, ‘I’m really good at the thing that I’m doing’, instead of feeling like we’re failing at it constantly.

I speak from experience as a hyper-achiever over here. For most of my life, I hated failing. I hated it so much, as I was someone who was good at most of the things that I did. So I struggled when I had to fail consistently. And one of the places I had to start to learn this, was when I became a fitness columnist for the Seattle Times.

Every single week I had to try something new. And I promise you, I was really bad at a lot of the things. I was taking Trapeze classes, I was taking dance classes, I was doing Capoeira, and these are not things I was actually good at. And so every week I would go into these intro classes and have no idea what I was doing. And what I learned from that experience is that I would survive. I actually started to get really resilient. I was actually okay with not being good at things.

That is a skill that kids often have. But as adults, we struggle with that one. And the more recent example is when the column ended, I decided to take tap dance classes, and I was really bad. I promise you I was really bad because everyone else in that class had taken it as a kid. I hardly had any tap experience. I did not have muscle memory, so I would get on stage (my studio performs), and I would actually not know all the steps. I performed that way, and it made me really start to be okay with not being good at things.

The more I built that part of my brain, the more I was actually okay with just not being attached to it. I was like, “Okay, I’m not going to be super great.” I’m now going to tell you how long it took me to be a decent tap dancer. Are you ready? Four years. It took me four years where week after week, I felt like a failure. Week after week, I would be in there and I’d be like, “Man, this is so hard.” But it was something that I kept doing, because of the fourth thing I want you to know about failure.

The fourth thing to know is to do things that bring you joy. Because that’s actually what was happening in tap. It was bringing me joy. So even as I was tapping and I was also feeling like I was failing, I was still having fun, I was still feeling super joyful. Dancing brings me so much joy. And what does joy have to do with failure? Joy has everything to do with it. Because the more things you have in your life that bring you joy, the easier it is to handle hard things. The more things that bring expansion and fun into your life, the easier it gets to be resilient in the face of challenge, in the face of things that aren’t going exactly your way, like failing.

So, if everything in your life feels hard, you are definitely going to have a harder time with failure, I promise you. If you have space and room for some joy in your life, you will feel good again. I really do promise this, because the more you start to lean into joy and you start to lean into things that make you feel good, and then you keep doing the things that make you feel good, that’s when we have resilience and the capacity for being around failure. 

These are the things I want to summarize again, for all of you to really think about failure, the ways to start to overcome fear of failure in your life:

• The first one is to stop making failure about you.
• The second one is to remember that failure is the best teacher in the whole world.
• The third thing is to remember to learn to fail on purpose, start to do things that you don’t know how to do, and see what happens there.
• The fourth and last thing is to make sure you’re doing things that bring you joy, make yourself more resilient in all areas of your life and I promise you, it will be easier to handle fear of failure.

Okay, so this brings me back here to you. I would love to hear your biggest takeaways when facing fear of failure, maybe even share with me what it is that you have felt really challenged in, where you’ve been feeling fear of failure. And then your takeaways after listening to this episode. So go ahead and DM me on Instagram @nicoletsong. Share with me what you’ve been noticing and how you can start to reframe failure for yourself and let’s hear it from there.

All right, thank you all so much for being here, and for being willing to look at this topic. And I cannot wait for all of us to redefine what fear of failure is in our lives. Okay, I’ll talk to you all soon.