Fear of Failure

Overcoming fear is not easy. Now I’m not asking you to overcome your fear of spiders. That’s a rational fear, LOL! I’m talking about the fears that are holding you back. The fear of failure. The fear of rejection. The fear of looking like a fool. All of those fears that are preventing you from getting what you want. There is a strategy one can use to overcome these limiting fears. It’s looking at the facts. Are you afraid to fail based on opinions or facts? The facts are there is nothing to lose when you fail and everything to gain. Even if you fail you learn something. Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times trying to invent the lightbulb. When he was asked after his first 5,000 failures why he didn’t give up he said, “I’ve learned 5,000 ways that it won’t work”. I’m paraphrasing here but you get the point. So let’s take a deeper look at what failure means and what facts can help you overcome them. Fear of failure can be summed up like this. The fear caused by opinions can be outweighed buy the success of facts. If you have a fear of rejection, it is often based on your opinion that you will be rejected. The fact is there is no reason to think you will fail. In fact confidence is key to not getting rejected in the first place. It reminds me of Boomhauer on King of the Hill. There was an episode where Bobby wanted to see how Boomhauer got so many women. He watched Boomhauer approach every woman he could, often getting slapped, until one of them agreed to go on a date with him. Who knows what he said, but he didn’t give up. The worst that happened to him was that he got slapped, which I assure you won’t happen in your situation. However, in the end he was successful. Now think about someone you feared getting rejected from. It doesn’t have to be a love interest. Just what facts do you have that support your fear of rejection. If you can’t think of any then you should go for it. The fear of failure is what keeps people from obtaining their goals. You clearly want to get somewhere and do something with your life so find the reasons and facts that will allow you to overcome your fears and get what you want. If you fail, you have only learned another way that it won’t work. Just be thankful you didn’t get slapped.