Give Yourself Permission to Fail

Fear of failure is not an excuse to avoid success.

Have you ever avoided doing something new because you were so afraid of failing?

This fear of failure comes in many ways, shapes, and forms.

Sometimes it sneaks up on you, treading softly and silently till it’s time for it to pounce. Other times, it’s a stifling feeling that engulfs you and closes off your airway, making it hard to breathe.

No matter how it comes to you, failure can be a bitter pill to swallow. It brings upon feelings of frustration, disappointment, maybe even anger. It feeds the seed of doubt that’s sowed in your self-confidence.

Unsurprisingly, we don’t like facing failure. But fear of failure is not an excuse to avoid success.

Why Do We Fear Failure?

First, we need to understand why we fear failure so that we can better address it. We inherently understand that failure doesn’t feel good, but exercising too hard doesn’t feel good either and we don’t fear that.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple explanation. There are many theories.

One theory is that we fear failure because we actually fear shame. Shame makes us feel bad about who we are to our core. It’s not just us feeling bad about something we did; it’s personal and psychologically toxic.

Another theory is that it’s linked to our education system and schooling. When we don’t provide the correct answer on a test, we get it wrong and there’s no going back to redo it. So we learn that there are consequences to failing.

Some believe it’s tied to our ego. What will failure cost us in social status? Will we be ridiculed by our peers? Perhaps even humiliated in front of them? To further compound this, we live in a society that overvalues fearlessness.

And others propose that our fear of failure can be linked to childhood circumstances, like unsupportive parents, or a particularly traumatic event that’s left scars on our psyche.

In short, there’s not one particular reason why we fear failure. Find the reasons that resonate most with you. There’s value in putting some thought into the root cause of your fear, but there’s even more value in moving forward through failure.

How Do We Make Failure Our Ally?

We can redefine failure.

No, I’m not going to mention Michael Jordan or Thomas Edison. Personally, I think these are overused examples that were never that relatable to begin with.

How many times have you defined what success means to you?

Given the plethora of life coaching advice and self-help books on the market, I’m going to guess plenty of times. Every time you set a SMART goal for yourself, you’re labeling what success means to you.

So why can’t we give failure the same treatment? Failure is often defined as a lack of success.

Perhaps we can define failure as practice.

My piano teacher used to hold weekly recitals for her students in preparation for competitions. I would consistently mess up the first time I performed any piece — wrong notes, incorrect counting, memory mistakes.

Sometimes my memory would blank completely and I’d look down at the keys, thinking it was just a blur of black and white, and that every key looked the same.

Did I fail at those recitals? Yes.

Was it embarrassing? Yes.

Was it devasting? The first couple of times, yes, but eventually, I came to see these recitals as practice performances so I could get my mistakes out of the way for the actual competition.

Perhaps we can redefine failure as a learning opportunity.

Maybe you didn’t answer an interview question the right way. You didn’t get the job and you’re kicking yourself for a subpar example of a time when you demonstrated leadership skills.

You’re going to give that question so much thought that you’ll find the perfect answer for it. Then, you’ll never give a subpar answer to that question ever again in your future interviews. Maybe you’ll even get feedback about what a great answer you’ve come up with.

Perhaps we can redefine failure as progress.

Maybe it wasn’t the home run you were hoping for but at least you went up to bat. You got off the bench and you showed up.

Sure, it doesn’t feel great when your writing is rejected by a magazine or a publication but does it mean that you’ve now failed at writing?

No, failing would be if you never wrote to begin with. You still have a finished article and you’ve now experienced the rite of passage that all writers go through — rejection.

However you choose to redefine failure, use it as an opportunity to celebrate something you’ve gained rather than something you’ve lost. The way you speak to yourself is important, and you want your inner voice working for you, not against you.

How Do We Overcome Our Failures?

We can give ourselves permission to fail.

We can’t always avoid failure but we can take away the power of negativity and worthlessness that failure holds over us.

Failure is not a be-all-end-all, “I can never show my face to the world again” apocalypse.

Failure can be a small setback. Something that didn’t go quite as you hoped but nothing you can’t recover from.

It’s like hitting a red traffic light. It might have stopped you from getting to your destination as quickly as you’d hoped but it’s not a devasting train wreck.

Failure is not an excuse to self-sabotage yourself.

It’s easier to have an excuse for failure than to admit you might not be good enough. But that’s all it is — an excuse.

You can’t lie to yourself. You know in your heart of hearts when you’ve put your best foot forward. And I would argue that it’s better to have tried your best and failed than to have never tried at all.

Failure is not a justification to avoid trying new things.

Don’t ever allow your inner voice to say, “I’ll probably just fail at that too like I’ve failed at everything else”.

I distinctly remember a poster in my sixth-grade classroom that said, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land amongst the stars.”

What an underrated message! It’s not just kids that need that message; we all need to be reminded of that once in a while.

We’ve explored why we fear failure, how we can make failure our ally, and how we can overcome our failure.

But just as it’s easier said than done, words are easy to come by and therefore, only have a limited amount of power. It won’t be till you practice failure and become acquainted on a first-name basis with failure that you can take away its negative power over you.

What are you waiting for? Give yourself permission to fail so you can start succeeding today!