WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE FEAR OF FAILURE?
This week I want to talk about what we do with the fear of failure.
It’s so so important that we address this as an elephant in the room for anyone who is contemplating doing something new or putting themselves out there in any way with their ideas or work. At some stage or another in our lives, our businesses or in our attempts at creating, we’ve all felt the sting of failure or disappointment.
- Something hasn’t quite taken off.
- The thing you poured your soul into was met with crickets
- The product you really believed in didn’t sell as well as you hoped.
- The idea you have had for a lifetime suddenly seems to be happening for other people all around you.
- We’ve all lost steam. We’ve all lost our nerve. We’ve all shut down and stopped.
This is the stuff of being human and we need to talk about it and normalise it just as much as we do the strategies and the reflective tasks we undertake when things are going well.
Especially for women, failure feels personal. It feels overwhelming and daunting. It shuts us down, closes us up and stops us from moving forward because failure feels SO vulnerable and exposing.
Often it feels like visceral rejection when things haven’t gone the way we hoped.
But - if we continue to try to hide from the things that aren’t going well, and bypass the hard feelings about the ways in which we feel things haven’t worked out we are going to miss out on a huge component of growth, of resilience building and of the courage honing muscles that it takes to life fully as a whole hearted person.
To fail and just hide is to skip the most significant work that we can do as humans. To fail and learn is how we grow and evolve and develop empathy for ourselves and others.
When we deny the times where things have crashed or we try and swipe away the hard, painful moments of discomfort we are missing out on an opportunity to learn and build.
I want to talk about three perspectives on failure that are really significant and freeing and can hopefully reframe our view of disappointment into liberating opportunities to understand ourselves, the world around us and how we can meaningfully continue to build courageous lives, even when things don’t work out how we had hoped.
Three perspectives on failure
1) The first thing I want to talk about is the importance of identifying how the fear of failure shows up for us.
Because this fear of failure is a huge deal and the effect it has on us is powerful. The perceived fear of failure is stopping women from bringing their ideas, products, solutions and service into the world. Think of all the amazing things that women have tucked inside them that can contribute to more goodness, more beauty, more awareness, more education in the world that are not being revealed because we are afraid of failure.
- I want you to take some time and really, REALLY hone in on how the fear of failure is showing up in your life. Is it hesitation of even looking into that thing you’ve been ruminating over? Is it showing up as perfectionism – never being quite ready to put that thing out there for others to see or hear about and endlessly polishing it up? Is it showing up as relentless calculation of numbers, followers, figures and stats? Waiting for that magic number before you dip your toe into the thing that you feel really drawn to make, create or do? If any of those things connect – I want you to feel relieved – there are so many of us that feel this way – but it doesn’t have to be so.
- The fear of failure is NEVER going away – again, this threat of failure is just a tactic of our inner protector that wants to keep us safe from emotional risk. but how we view failure can be reframed to serve us better. If we can try and view it differently as I’ll line out in the next few minutes, then maybe, just maybe we can be women who boldly try, showing up and being true even when it feels scary, knowing that it’s more important to be loyal to our dreams and our desires than it is to our fears.
2) Secondly I think it’s important to talk about expectations.
When we set out to bring something to life in the world, often we are caught up in the how, the what and the when that we forget to reflect on what we want this offering to achieve. We spend a lot of time working out the details of all the other stuff without giving thought to our own expectations around it and when we forget to take that stuff into consideration and things don’t go to plan, we end up feeling hijacked, dijected, thrown and deflated. Something that I like to do to try and manage my own expectations around whatever it is that I’m going to put into the world is to get comfortable with the base level.
For me, the base level of my expectations is about being loyal to my idea and affirming that I AM HAPPY WITH HAVING COMPLETED WHAT I SET OUT TO DO. My own satisfaction is the top of my expectation list. This trumps anything that comes next. Have I been true to my values? Have I worked hard? Have I put the time in? Have I really took into consideration what will serve my community well?
Once that is in place, I try to hold the rest of the expectations a little less tightly. Once I have decided that I am happy with what I have done or put out there, then I am more able to identify what kind of response or reaction I want to have from the things I put out there. The more secure I can feel in the value of my work, and naming the desires for impact that I have can actually help give me the energy and self support that I need to put those things in the eyesight of the people I want to serve or connect with. And it takes energy to do that because marketing or talking about our offerings can be tiring and exposing. Having no idea of our expectations, or just having our expectations swirling around in a mass of insecure ideas can actually harm us, because we haven’t fully connected with our desires or outcomes and that is an important and worthy part of the process, not to be overlooked.
3) The final thing that I want to say about failure (and this is the gamechanger) is that everything we do, every wrong turn, tricky decision, every way that we hide, every time we choose to stop, is SIMPLY JUST AN OPPORTUNITY TO RECEIVE INFORMATION.
- Every time we put something out into the world and we get a response, whether good, bad, noisy or quiet – it’s all just information. Learning this – THAT EVERYTHING IS JUST INFORMATION has been a REALLY SIGNIFICANT, LIBERATING part of my visibility journey and remembering this aspect has given me real courage as I have decided to put my ideas out there, marketed my offerings and continually chosen to show up for myself truly. Everything we receive back – its not good. It’s not bad. It’s not praise OR criticism. It’s JUST INFORMATION. And it’s up to us what we do with that information.
- If you’ve ever launched something to crickets or posted an idea that didn’t take off or developed a product that didn’t sell – it’s not that the idea was bad. It’s not that what you had to offer wasn’t valuable or interesting.
The quiet response is just information. And it’s up to us to access and use that information wisely. If our offering is not connecting, it doesn’t mean it’s a failure. It might just mean that we need to collect more information. These things that might immediately feel like failure might just be an opportunity to get the information you need to get your thing out there in a way that does connect.
It might mean you need more information about the time of the month or year you are offering it. It might mean you need more information about the people you are trying to reach. It might mean you need more information about what price points. It might mean you need more information about what kind of set up people feel is accessible etc. It might mean you need to build more trust with your customer or audience base in order to connect in the way you are expecting to…
- This information isn’t given to you to shut you down and stop you, like your inner critic or ego would like. It’s given to you as a gift to sift through and determine what you should do with it. See this as a gift to build on rather than an out or an opportunity to wallow or quit. If we can see this information as a way of shaping what you do so that more people can connect with it in the way you want them to then we are exercising bravery and resilience and our ego is not in the driving seat – service and value is.
Here’s the thing.
When we look at things through this lens of failure is just information, it kind of makes the threat of failure less powerful. Of course there are always going to be risks when we decide to put ourselves out there and take steps to pursue something close to our hearts and the risks are real and we have to deal with the real feelings of fear and discomfort.
The other option is to not do anything with the things we feel drawn to create or do and the trade off for that is another type of discomfort. It’s the discomfort of always wondering if we could have given that thing a go. It’s the discomfort of maybe never feeling the fulfilment of trying.
Both paths lead to some sort of risk and that’s the work – figuring out which one – because we are going to face discomfort either way. Hopefully you’ll chose the one that gives you the chance to be loyal to yourself.
In the meantime, please reach out to me with any of your own thoughts on this and know that if you want to build courage in a deeper way you would be so welcome to join the assembly members community – my coaching community of women who are all on this courage building journey together.
