Fear of Failure
Why are we so afraid of failure?
This might seem like an easy question to answer: Well, failure sucks. It’s something we don’t want, by definition. It’s a natural fear!
But is it?
From birth, human beings are hardwired to learn and build skills through trial and error. Any parent, caregiver, or teacher can tell you that failure and recovery is an intrinsic part of this process. For example, research has found that when toddlers are learning to walk, they fall down an average of 17 times per hour for six months or more! That’s a lot of failure, and a lot of getting up and trying again.
So if it’s not innate, when and how do we learn to be afraid of failing? I think it happens when we learn to associate failure with shame. As children, we’re intensely sensitive to the approval or disapproval of the adults around us. Unfortunately, the same people who teach us new skills in childhood can also teach us, deliberately or unintentionally, that we’re good when we succeed and learn, and bad when we don’t. We start to incorporate this evaluation of our skills and learning into our sense of self. We start to believe that success or failure reveals something essential about our inner nature: success means we’re good and have value, failure means we’re bad and worthless.
When we think this way, it’s much harder to get up again and keep trying after a setback. Why try again, when the experience of failure has already “revealed” that you’re the “wrong kind of person” to succeed? Why try in the first place, if there’s a risk of being “revealed” as worthless? And even when we do succeed, this kind of thinking can haunt us, giving rise to impostor syndrome: do I really deserve this success? I’m not the “right kind of person” to succeed– remember all those failures I experienced? This success doesn’t belong to me, I stole it from much more deserving people.
So how do we get out of this trap? Here’s what I’d advise:
Changing how we think about success and failure: Seen objectively, success or failure at anything is just information. It tells you whether the approach you’re using works or not. That’s it. It does not reveal anything about who you fundamentally are.
Self-validation: This is what your friends and therapists mean when they tell you to be kinder to yourself. They mean don’t actively treat yourself in a way that hinders your growth. Invalidation (calling yourself bad, wrong, worthless, etc.) makes failure more painful, and this makes it much harder to persist through the trial and error needed to learn and grow.
Self-compassion: When you were very small, you learned how to do hard and scary things when someone you trusted held your hand and helped you. As an adult, it’s now your job to do that for yourself.
