How to Use Fear of Failure to Your Advantage

For my three-year old daughters, life is a series of endless discovery.

Snow. Tricycles. Gymnastics. New Foods. Park Slides. French lessons with Kari. At each new discovery, they are faced with decision. Do I try this tall slide? Or do I skip it? Or do I just watch for a bit? Sometimes all it takes is reassurance – in the form of me standing at the bottom of the slide to “catch” them. But sometimes they let fear or uncertainty keep them off the slide altogether.

I think we do the same thing.

No one wants to look foolish.

No one likes rejection and failure. No one wants to fall off the slide. So we stay far away from it, in the feigned safety of our living room. We avoid the slide altogether. Stephen Pressfield adds, “Being paralyzed with fear is a good sign. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. The more scared we are of a calling, the more we know we have to do it.”

When we avoid fear, we miss life. Our fear is deeper than we have imagined. Sometimes we live every day overwhelmed. Sometimes we miss years of opportunity. But what we don’t understand, deep in our souls:

Sometimes we want to fail.

It’s our preemptive strike on fear.

If we never try to get to the finish line — we never have to face it. If we never show our writing to the publisher, our new idea to our peers, our dream to the public, we never have to face their rejection. If we never propose to her, we never know her answer. We never have to face our deep fear.

To relieve ourselves of the fear, we pre-fail.

Failure is inevitable, so we choose it before it happens. We fail to put an end to our fear of failure. If we throw in the towel before we fail, we don’t have to live under fear anymore.

So we fail by sabotaging ourselves.

Or we fail with our passivity and inaction. We never step into the ring. We never roar.

When we pre-fail, we never give ourselves a chance. And one day, years from now, we become an old person who fills out the Facebook survey for “Biggest Regrets of the Dying.” Thomas Merton writes,

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

What are you living for? What do you want to live for? What is keeping you from living for that? How do you need to face your fear – right now?

How to Use Fear of Failure to Your Advantage is a post from: Storyline Blog