Fear of failure is limiting your life. It’s the reason why you don’t ask for that raise at work, why you haven’t started your own business yet, and why you haven’t tried out that hobby that you think looks really fun.
But fear doesn’t have to hold you back. It’s a useful emotion that you can use to help you grow.
The Link Between Fear and Excitement
Think about the last time you were really nervous or scared—maybe it was a job interview, a big presentation, or you were asking someone out on a date.
Now think about the last time you were excited. Perhaps it was riding a roller coaster, meeting your favorite band at a VIP experience, or sharing something you were really proud of online.
Whether you’re scared or excited, your heart starts racing, your palms get sweaty, and your mind is buzzing with energy. Those feelings of nervousness and excitement are actually the same thing.
They’re both caused by our amygdala lighting up in our brain, which is responsible for our fight or flight response.
Our brains can’t always tell the difference between danger and opportunity, and physical and non-physical threats look the same to our minds.
So, it responds the same way to a negative comment online as it would if someone were shouting at you in the street.
Reframing Fear as Excitement
When I first started my YouTube channel, I was really anxious.
I worried about whether people would watch it, whether they’d like it, and whether it would be useful to anyone.
But instead of letting fear stop me, I reframed it as excitement. I was excited about sharing something meaningful that might even help just one person, and that excitement pushed me through.
How Fear of Failure Develops
When we’re babies learning to walk, we don’t have a fear of failure.
We learn to walk by taking one step and then falling down, but we get back up and try again. We don’t care what people think of us.
But as we grow up, we learn to be fearful from various experiences in our lives. The things that made you feel failure will be unique to you, but there are some common experiences that many people can relate to.
1. Society Values Success
Society places a lot of value on success, and when you fail, you can feel like you’re letting people down.
You might be trusted with an important project at work and feel scared of messing it up.
2. Childhood
If your parents or caregivers only praised you when you succeeded and made a big deal out of mistakes, you might have learned to fear failure early on.
If succeeding at something felt like the only time you got their approval, then as an adult, you can feel like you’re unworthy or not good enough.
3. Perfectionism
Your fear of failure might, like mine, come from perfectionism. You feel like everything has to be perfect, so even a small mistake feels massive. I always try to remind myself of this quote:
“Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it.”
Salvador Dali
4. Past failures
We all learn through experiences, and if you’ve failed at something in the past and it led to embarrassment or criticism, it’s natural that you’ll feel nervous about trying again.
When I gave presentations at university, I would get really nervous and turn bright red because I was so embarrassed and scared of public speaking.
It was just the beginning of a horrible cycle of panic, and I would try to avoid doing any presentations at all.
I was happy to do everything else—make the PowerPoint, do all the research—but I didn’t want to present it.
The Failure Loop and Avoidance
The problem with this is that avoiding failure prevents you from gaining confidence.
If you wait around for confidence to come, you’ll be waiting forever.
The only way you can build confidence is by making yourself uncomfortable, and over time, it becomes less and less uncomfortable.
That’s why I’m able to make YouTube videos now. I wish I could have told my younger self this so I would have gained confidence much earlier.
5. Seeing others fail
If you see someone fail in a way that’s really embarrassing, it can make you feel like the same thing will happen to you if you try it.
For example, if you see someone skateboarding and they keep falling over when they try a trick, you may not want to try it yourself to avoid that pain.
6. Catastrophizing
Sometimes, our brains catastrophize what we’re thinking about, imagining a total disaster if we mess it up.
If you decide to change careers, your brain might be telling you, “But then you’ll never be able to go back to the one you just left. You’ll completely suck at the new one, and you’ll lose all the respect of your old colleagues.”
This is just rubbish.
7. Your self-worth is at risk
It’s easy to tie your self-worth to being successful in that new thing, so if you fail, you don’t tell yourself “I’ve failed” you say, “I’m a failure.”
It feels like you’re failing as a person, not just in that one task.
8. Fear of Ambiguity and Uncertainty
Sometimes, your fear of failure comes from a fear of ambiguity and the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen when you try.
You start imagining all the ways it could go wrong, and instead of confronting the fear, you try to control the situation.
But imagining all these things that could go wrong builds up fear and stops you from even trying.
Stoic Philosophy and Fear of Failure
Wherever your fear of failure comes from, you can deal with it using one powerful and easy technique.
Stoic philosophers believed that there are only two things we can control in life:
- Our actions
- Out thoughts
These belong in our internal circle.
Everything else is external to us and is therefore out of our control. This includes things like the past, the thoughts and behaviors of other people, and the opinions they have of you.
So, if someone gives you feedback on your work or criticizes you, or if you wonder whether people will like this video, these are all external factors you can’t control.
In fact, there’s a rhyme from Mother Goose that sums it up well.
“For every ailment under the sun, there is a remedy or there is none. If there be one, try to find it; if there be none, never mind it.”
Mother Goose
The next time you’re fearing failure, try to let it go and remember that all of these are external factors that you can’t control anyway. All you can do is take action towards the thing you want.
Letting Go of Other People’s Opinions
One of the hardest external factors to let go of is other people’s opinions.
Telling someone to ignore horrible words is like telling an angry person to calm down—it doesn’t work.
If you’ve ever created something and put it out into the world, you know the courage and vulnerability it takes. Even if you get ten great comments, it’s the one negative comment that sticks with you.
Our brains are wired to be more attuned to negative events. In prehistoric times, being able to quickly respond to potential threats, like predators or flooding, helped humans survive.
It’s well-known that negative opinions trigger stronger emotional responses than positive ones. So, when we feel criticized or attacked, our fight or flight response is activated, and we remember it more.
That’s why the news is filled with negative headlines.
Overcoming Negative Thoughts and Feedback
To calm down my fear of failure when I’m worried about what others might say, I remind myself of a couple of quotes.
Successful people don’t pull others down.
A fit person will never criticize you for starting a diet, and a businessperson will never criticize you for starting a company.
They understand the work it takes to achieve success and they know that lifting others up helps everyone grow.
Frederick Amissah
And when you’re trying something new, always remember:
“Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.”
Bernard Baruch
Dealing with Negative Thoughts and Inner Chatter
It’s not just other people’s opinions that hold us back; our own thoughts can work against us too.
When you try to do something new or express yourself creatively, you’ll get all this inner chatter, like:
- “I’m not good enough,”
- “I’ll never be able to do that,”
- “Why am I even trying?”
One way I deal with negative thoughts is by switching my brain into more of a visual mode.
Imagine a bucket of crabs. If one crab tries to climb out, the others try to grab it and pull it back down. They hold each other back, even though they could all escape if they worked together. I see my negative thoughts as those crabs, trying to pull me back down because my brain is trying to protect me from the pain of failure. But all it’s doing is holding me back.
I love this quote by Mark Twain:
“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn no other way.”
Mark Twain
It perfectly sums up what it’s like to learn and fail. The only way you can really learn is by doing and experiencing. You have to accept that you might screw up, but failure is a step in the right direction. It gives you feedback so that you know what to do better next time.
Embracing a Growth Mindset
This aligns perfectly with Carol Dweck’s theory of the growth mindset.
She found that people who approach failure as a learning experience are more successful.
- If you see failure as a way to grow, then you likely have a growth mindset.
- Do you believe you can continue to learn new things?
- Do you embrace challenges and see them as opportunities to grow?
- Are you resilient and persistent when things set you back?
- Do you value the process of learning more than the outcomes?
If you have a growth mindset, it’s easier to see your fear of failure as useful messages your body and brain are sending to you. They’re telling you that you’re doing something big and important.
Facing Fear and Taking Action
So, it really is a case of feeling the fear and doing it anyway. But you don’t need to dive in at the deep end.
Find things that are a bit of a stretch for you, but that don’t make you panic, so you don’t feel overwhelmed and traumatized and then never try again.
A couple of years ago, I really wanted to perform music in public, but I was terrified of performing in front of others.
I had such performance anxiety that booking an in-person music lesson where I might mess up in front of a teacher was a huge deal for me.
After I gained some confidence, I joined a local ukulele club, where my mistakes wouldn’t be heard in a group.
Then, after I’d been there for a while, I started singing as well as playing. Later, I wrote my own song and posted a video on YouTube.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was following a therapy technique called exposure therapy.
This technique involves gradually increasing your exposure to things you’re afraid of. It reminds me of a line from the Baz Luhrmann song Always Wear Sunscreen:
“Do one thing each day that scares you.”
Taking Action Toward Your Fear
- What is the fear that’s holding you back right now?
- Can you reframe it as a sign of growth and acknowledge that you can only control your own behaviors and thoughts?
- Take one small action toward facing this fear.
If those questions have triggered a lot of overthinking, you might find it helpful to check out my video and post about four different ways to stop overthinking so you can stop the voice in your head and take action.
Watch the full video on YouTube