Two Tips for Overcoming Fear of Failure
Transcript:
Hi! Welcome to this week’s episode here on Work Your Biz Like A Boss, the place for all things biz and boss. This week we’re discussing the big F word—failure! No one likes to fail. But for entrepreneurs failure can be pretty tough for us because the entire point is to be successful. Am I right?!
And I’m sure you’ve heard all the stories about people who overcame tremendous failure like Oprah Winfrey who was fired from her first journalism job because got too emotionally involved with her stories. Or what about Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken who lost everything in his 60’s when he launched KFC and then his recipe was stolen from him. Or Abraham Lincoln. He’s the epitome of failure until he became president only to be assassinated. And one of my personal favorites, Walt Disney, who was fired from his newspaper job because he lacked imagination.
The list goes on and one. And while the stories are inspiring, they’re not always enough to keep us going. I mean, what’s the guarantee that we will succeed? Or what about paralyzing failure where you are just lost? Let me address both and then give you some tips.
First, there isn’t any guarantee of success. There won’t ever be a guarantee for success; therefore, that question is useless to ask. Success relies dominantly on you anyway, so you decide your success. Yeah, I know that natural disasters, economic downturns, and more can cause failure but those are few and far between. Executing your plan with belief you’ll succeed is the best thing you can do to get as close to a guarantee as possible.
Paralyzing Failure
I’ve had paralyzing failure before. It was in 2017 when I launched my first Facebook ads for my business. I had spent months learning how to do them just right. I then spent weeks figuring it all out and getting them ready. I launched with tremendous excitement and then…crickets. I mean absolutely nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada. I was crushed. You know how you get such expectation attached to an outcome only to have all of them crushed, stomped on, and ground to powder? That was me. Of course, I’m exaggerating. But what I’m not exaggerating is it took me five months to get over that! I knew I needed to figure out what went wrong but I couldn’t make myself to it.
Later, I broke down why I was so jacked and realized that as a young person, I was really good with learning in school. I made straight A’s (until geometry). It was easy to learn, apply it, and get good grades. I went into Facebook ads with the same mindset—I should have success right from the start. When that didn’t happen, my ego took a huge hit. And I learned that the expectation of mastery on the first try led to a fixed mindset, which takes us to our tips.
TIPS
One of the most important tips I can give you is to pursue a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. A growth mindset views failure as an opportunity. I know, it sounds like a platitude. It’s not. Failure is simply feedback. Unfortunately, our ego often sees failure as a value statement for us personally or an indicator of our intelligence. Failure is a natural part of Research and Development. In fact, you must fail in R & D in order to get the best product or service out there. A fixed mindset will require perfection, which leaves you with no room for growth. A fixed mindset is ego based.
The second tip is to tackle what you fear failing first! Procrastination is often masking fear of failure. Sometimes it can be dreading a task that seems huge and time consuming (only to find it wasn’t as bad as you thought). Once I began to pursue a growth mindset, I realized that procrastination was how I was avoiding future failure. I decided to create a personal policy—tackle the one thing I want to NOT do first and then do the rest of the items on my list. At first, I’d find myself unconsciously putting off a task until I did a check in and realized what I was doing. Now I spot it pretty quick.
Don’t take feedback personal. Use it to tweak and fix those things that would have made your product or service substandard or an open door for a competitor to out-do you. And if you’re brave enough, ask for feedback. That will really kill the ego.
