Fear of Failure… Is Actually Taking You Towards Success!

If you had a fear of spiders or snakes would you pick on up?

No, you would move away or run screaming in the opposite direction…

This considered, if you had a fear of failure you would move away from it like any other fear and be going towards success.

So if you thought you had a fear of failure, and you are not achieving as much as you believe you can… maybe it is a fear of success.

What is it about success that maybe scares you?

Fears are one of the main areas I assist clients in overcoming…

Fears can be experienced through a bad or negative experience, learnt through others or modelled from influential people in our lives. Fears can also be created by media, movies and dreams.

Even though you know the best thing to do is to go toward success and change… your conscious mind may have different ideas!

For the mind, fear is ‘potential hurt!’ – not reality.

The other interesting thing to note here is that when you are in a negative state you only look back to the past and previous failures, don’t you? Any wonder we protect ourselves.

When we are in a positive we only look forward!

How does the conscious mind know this?

It doesn’t…It has the ability to slam the door on opportunities so that you may not experience hurt by failure… even though this opportunity may be the big break you were looking for
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So fear is potential hurt, it is created by our own past experience or imposed by others who say ‘be careful of…’ and that is enough for the fear to be set or confirmed.

So the funny thing is…

We create the potential situation in future, by the dreams, thoughts and actions we have.

We then add a potential failure to it based on our past experience.

Then we could spend years fighting what we created!!!

If we had never experienced failure, hurt, loss or sadness we would never fear anything…

Look at your kids, learn from your kids. They believe they can fly, they are invincible, they trust, they dream and they just play.

And at times we are the ones to restrict all of this through our own experiences, just like your parents did to you! The great thing is we can blame our parents, we also have to point the finger at ourselves as we allowed this to be imposed upon us.

This manifests as ‘self sabotaging’ habits as your mind and body are working together to get away from potential hurt or failure. If you notice this then your mind is doing as it was designed… to protect you.
If you look at your fears, trace them back to the situation at the time and understand what is happening, then you will find a way around them.

I worked with a lady a few weeks ago who said she had a fear of getting bogged in the sand in her 4 wheel drive. At the time she was not in her car or bogged so is it a fear?

It is something that may happen, it may also not happen.

If it did not happen is it a fear? Or just an unrealised expectation?

If she did get bogged, it is not a fear, it is a reality… now she has to get out! This then becomes an action or reaction at that time, you do not know what you are going to do until you have to.

You see… it is interesting to understand ‘fear’ is created by potential happenings and attached negative emotions based on our past emotional experiences.

Understand this and ‘fears’ become an ‘excuses to succeed’.

Choose to succeed despite the past and just like children, we can fly!

Fear is also a requirement for survival, we need it. We just do not need to be restricted by it. We need to accept that what we do could be dangerous, it could create harm, it could not work and we may lose the opportunity forever.

written by: STUART WALTER