How To Trick Yourself Out of Fear of Failure

An easy way to never fail

There are many people who have a crushing fear of failure. The idea of failing, or even of not succeeding as well as they did previously, traps them in an endless downward spiral. They take no risks.

If they were able to do 100 pushups, the next time they went to the gym, they’d try to do 80. That way they’d be sure they’d be able to do them. The next time, they’d shoot for 65. And so on, until they lost the ability to do the 100 pushups they’d started with.

Because they kept dropping their expectations, at no point did they “fail”. When they look back at their overall experience, however, they’ll see that they failed at life.

Even the rest of us, who don’t have fear of failure to such an extent, still get a tremor in our tummies when we do new things. Nobody likes to fail.

This simple trick prevents you from failing

There’s a simple trick to short-circuit the fear of failure, however. Change the rules of measurement.

Don’t measure a specific achievement, and rate it as a success or a failure. Measure your process. As long as your process is improving — getting better results, requiring less effort, using fewer resources, or operating measurably better in any other dimension — your process is not a failure.

In fact, if you use this trick, there’s only one way to fail. Quit.

If you quit, your process will never get any better. You will fail.

If you keep slogging along, doing what you’ve been doing, but you quit trying to improve, your process may get a little better. But eventually, pure repetition won’t generate improvement any longer, and you will fail.

If, however, you continue to work on your process, even just a little bit, you will continue to improve. You may discover lots of ways not to do something. But you’ve narrowed the possible space of ways the thing could be done. Your process is improving!

Focus on your wins

So how do you prevent yourself from quitting? You focus on your wins.

Every day, finish your day by making a note of all the ways you improved your processes. You might have figured out a great way to do something. You might have achieved one of your interim goals. Or, you might have rebounded from a disaster faster than you did before.

Remember, a win doesn’t have to be an achievement. It could be any process improvement. People who offered you insight. Examples you can learn from. Even places where you tried too hard or did too much, and discovered where the boundary of your current comfort zone is.

I note my wins in my paper planner. Other people put them in a gratitude journal, or keep a running record on their phone. How you do it doesn’t matter so much as that you do it.

Looking back over my list of wins for the past week, there are traditional achievements — articles written and exams passed. But I also had a research project that defined a health problem, along with short-term and long-term solutions. I learned the location of different services in our new town. I got to know some fascinating new people, and tried two new restaurants, as well as planning for the coming month.

All of these things improve my process, even the ones that objectively look like failures. For example, I found the food from one of the restaurants virtually inedible. But my process has been improved, because it’s a super popular restaurant, and we’d received invitations to join people for a meal there. Now I know my husband can meet people there, but we need a different venue if I’m going with him.

Conclusion

Fear of failure rears its head when you treat your life as a series of individual tasks that you meet or fail to meet. In an effort to avoid failing, many people set such low expectations that they end up failing over the long term.

Instead of judging whether you fail or succeed based on individual tasks, judge your overall process. That allows you to be constantly improving, even if individual actions don’t have the results you wanted.

When you succeed or fail based on your process, the only way to fail is to quit. And the best way to stay motivated and not quit is to focus on your wins. Anything that improves your process is a win, even if it objectively looks like failure.

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Read Liberty Forrest, Author’s article about fear of failure that prompted this response:

And here’s Christina’s specific experience of learning to view success as a process: