Success coaches talk a lot about overcoming the fear of failure. They frequently quote Thomas Edison’s persistence when he was trying to invent the light bulb; saying how many hundreds of failures he had before he succeeded.
Success in learning is no different.
You need the confidence to make mistakes
Obviously some mistakes need to be avoided at all costs. If we learn to swim by jumping into a fast moving river, or give our 5 year old child a knife and leave them to practice with it, we are asking for trouble. Obviously the fear of failure here is a good thing.
But when the risk is finding out that we cannot do something, or that we might show ourselves up, we need to get over our fear of failure.
Failure is good
I actively look for things that I know I’m not going to be able to succeed in straight away. I want to find things that I’m going to fail at time after time. Why? Because I know that’s when I’m learning; it’s when I’m expanding the capacity of my brain.
Quite simply, if you’re not failing, you’re not pushing yourself enough. Albert Einstein said:
“The person, who never made a mistake, never tried anything new.”
It’s true. If you have a fear of failure you won’t:
- ask questions
- try to learn new things
- improve your life in any way
So don’t fear failure; celebrate it. Every time we fail, we learn something that makes failure less likely next time. We may fail 100 times in a row if it is really hard, but each time that happens it is more likely that we will succeed the next time.
Since ‘failure’ is a negative word, people often find it helpful to replace it with a different word – such as ‘feedback’. Notice how fear of failure sounds quite logical, but fear of feedback seems just a little ridiculous!
When you try something and don’t succeed we get a whole bunch of information that will help us perform better next time. A bad essay for example, will have comments from the tutor on how to improve it. Or if we strike a tennis ball with our racket and it goes too far, we know to adjust the angle of the racket next time. We simply concentrate on what we can learn from the experience; not simply on the result.
Social confidence
When we were kids we were really confident. We had amazing trust in our parents to protect us, and so we didn’t have any problem with experimenting and learning. Our fear of failure was near zero. We just didn’t care about it, because we knew our parents would provide a safety net for us.
As we grow older we generally lose that safety net, and the result of failure can have larger consequences.
One of the best things to do, if we are to get over our fear of failure, is try to find that safety net again. If you find that the people you are surrounding yourself with don’t support you and you don’t really trust them, the risks from experimenting increase.
So, wherever possible, surround yourself with people who are very supportive when it comes to teaching you things, or giving you the space to learn for yourself. You don’t want peers that will laugh at your mistakes and encourage your fear of failure; you want those that will encourage you.
Likewise your peers will appreciate the same support. Set an example, and learn to be encouraging to others. Don’t lie to them, and make out that they are doing well when they are actually making no progress at all. Unless you can point out specific areas where they are improving, they will know you don’t mean it and your good intentions will actually have the opposite effect.
Unfortunately the people around you are not always going to be as supportive as you would like. In this case you have to have the strong internal belief that if you keep failing enough times, you will succeed. When you have that belief you can use it to prove to those that try to put you down, that they are wrong. In other words turn their negativity around and tell them that ‘you’ll show them’!
Overcoming the fear of failure
You may want to read lots of success books and biographies of successful people who have had success against the odds. That should give you the inspiration to begin believing this is true. It should develop some faith in you. Practically every book about someone successful will have this message in it. So if you don’t believe it, buy some autobiographies of people like Steve Redgrave, Donald Trump, James Dyson, Thomas Edison, or Richard Branson. Read enough stories until you believe this is true.
After that, you are going to have to prove that it is also true for you.
Lots of people get really inspired by reading about successful people, but they become addicted to hearing those stories. It’s not surprising, because reading those stories motivates us and makes us feel good; therefore we read more of them. The harder step is actually putting it into action.
When we read about a success it seems easy and we just see the glory. But when we try to put it into action the successes usually take longer and the failures come quicker. But when we do succeed in real life, that reward is a thousand times better than reading about it.
The best tip I can think of is to start small, and to look out for the small successes along the way. Start by taking on a challenge where the fear of failure exists, but is relatively small.
The more you prove to yourself that you can succeed in learning something, the more confident you will become in your ability to do it again. It’s important to begin by trying to learn something that you think is just outside your grasp. And make sure you never give up. If you give up you will be destroying your confidence. If you do decide to give something up, make sure it is for the right reason. Be honest with yourself, and ask whether you are giving up because it won’t be worth having once you’ve achieved it, or because it seems too hard.
If you pick something big that you will find incredibly hard to learn, and it will take you years; you run the risk of giving up before you have gained the confidence. So pick something that you can’t do, but that you can learn something significant about in a few hours. If it takes you longer than you expected, make sure that you continue to learn it. Ultimate success is the important thing.
As you gain confidence you can begin to pick bigger goals. For example, I’m currently learning a foreign language which I always believed was impossible for me. But to gain the level of confidence to take it on, I learnt something that would take less time first…
Juggling!
Juggling and how I couldn’t learn it until I had learnt to control my fear of failure
I write a lot about my experience with juggling. That’s because it means a lot to me.
I’ve persisted with a lot of things in my life; but most things I’ve felt confident that I could do well. Juggling was something that I knew I couldn’t do well. For years I believed it was impossible for me to ever be able to do it.
I had to get over my fear of failure. I had to get over the fact that I wasn’t going to be good when I began. I had to dig deep and prove to myself that I could do anything I put my mind to.
I’d recently read a success book, that convinced me that I could do anything that I put all my focus into and was prepared to make lots of mistakes.
My first attempts were embarrassing!
I started with two balls; one in each hand. I managed to throw the first ball from my right hand, but when I went to throw the second ball from my left hand I couldn’t convince myself to release my grip! I would move my hand in the throwing motion, but I couldn’t figure out how to actually let go.
Yes; I was really bad!
But I had confidence in my ability to learn. I didn’t have that fear of failure, so I kept trying.
And about 3 hours later I managed to do an entire round of the juggle.
This was the catalyst which meant I learnt much more advanced juggles, which include me doing things like crossing my hands over while I juggle. And my hand/eye coordination has dramatically improved as a result.
I’ve tried teaching people to juggle since. When I ask them whether they had been practicing, they say that they did it for a bit but they just can’t juggle. They have no confidence in their ability to learn so why bother putting in all that practice if they are just going to fail?
Fear of failure stops us in so many areas of our learning. It could be learning to play sport, maths, writing, reading, playing a musical instrument, learning a language, debating…
All I can say is all the things that I used to think I was naturally bad at, and I just wasn’t the kind of person that would ever be good at it, was really just a lack of practice. I had the fear of failure, so I didn’t try.