Are You Taking The Necessary Baby Steps?

Atychiphobia (Fear of Failure) is an intense fear of failure. While most of us do not have that full-blown condition, the symptoms can manifest more or less with a similar outcome. You may find yourself avoiding any situation where there is a potential for failure. Think relationships, job interviews, new businesses, exams. Fear of failure and procrastination are closely linked.

Sadly the fear can become self-fulfilling as you hold back from avoiding all of these situations. Ultimately by not tackling it head-on, fear of failure can lead to shame, depression, anxiety or low self-esteem.

It’s completely normal for humans to be fearful of new situations or ventures as that’s what keeps us out of danger after all. However allowing it to escalate to preventing you from taking simple steps forward in life, eroding your enjoyment of life and ultimately perhaps your earning potential and important relationships, means you may need outside help to identify the potential cause.

Whether you have a family history of phobias or anxiety, or whether your fear is learned behaviour from people telling you failure was unacceptable you can learn to overcome it and in fact around 90% of people respond extremely well to both exposure therapy and cognitive behaviour therapy.

We ALL fail in order to get better at something. In its simplest form, think of a baby learning to walk, when you learned to drive and stalled the car, baked a terrible cake or discovered you were terrible at art. We all just picked ourselves back up and eventually succeeded or tried something else. So failing at the larger things in life is no different. Sure there may be bigger outcomes, but given that 99% of what we worry about never happens, even those outcomes are unlikely to be deal-breakers. If you follow most of the movers and shakers in the world, you’ll read they failed many, many times before they succeeded at something. To the world it looked like overnight success but that is exceedingly rare!

Exposure therapy is like baby steps. Break down all the tasks, put it in writing or use a digital organiser and then start one step at a time until your confidence grows.

If you’d like help with this and how it relates to your business, you can book a mind-set coaching call with me, and there’s also many great books I can put you onto if you drop me a private message.

Ultimately, on your death bed … will you be glad you tried and perhaps failed, or suffering unimaginably with regrets because you never tried at all?

To all of you who DO have this fear, and who are taking a step every single day – congratulations to you! Keep it up! Sending good vibes to you.