Fear of failure
I was having a conversation with someone recently who wanted to try something new, but said it would be pointless to try because they'd just fail anyway. I'm not really a fan of this viewpoint. It always seems odd to me that people can work so hard to avoid failing that they never even try - and therefore never succeed, which, to me, is the biggest failure of all.
Take public speaking for example, it's probably the biggest fear of all. Yet the actual risk from public speaking is tiny. Just the fact that you may fail in public is enough to scare people even more than death. And because they are so scared of failing, they wont even try. Worrying so much about failing isn't entirely incorrect when you want to try something new, in all likelihood you will fail. A lot. The point isn't to avoid falling, it's to learn from those failures so that your next attempt has a higher chance of success. Even experts fail a lot of the time, the difference is they learn from it and move on.
To take this kind of thinking to the extreme, how long would you give your child to learn to walk? Maybe two months before you decided they can't do it and should give up? Six? One year? Of course you wouldn't, that's ridiculous. You'll want them to keep trying until they get it, no matter how long it takes. Which is why pretty much everyone on the planet can walk. I'm not saying that you should keep trying the same thing over and over again, that's just as silly as not trying in the first place. As Benjamin Franklin once said:
If what you're doing isn't getting you any closer to your goal then try something else. What if that doesn't work? Then try sometimes else, and keep trying different things until you find something that does work. If you want to start up your own business, ask somebody out on a date or anything in-between - don't let fear of failure hold you back.
Hypnosis can obviously help with fear of failure, but a much cheaper way is to try following some advice from Steve Pavlina and fail on purpose. You'll save yourself some cash, and get to try some stuff you'd probably never have attempted otherwise.
If you just keep trying to avoid failure, you'll never achieve any real success.
Take public speaking for example, it's probably the biggest fear of all. Yet the actual risk from public speaking is tiny. Just the fact that you may fail in public is enough to scare people even more than death. And because they are so scared of failing, they wont even try. Worrying so much about failing isn't entirely incorrect when you want to try something new, in all likelihood you will fail. A lot. The point isn't to avoid falling, it's to learn from those failures so that your next attempt has a higher chance of success. Even experts fail a lot of the time, the difference is they learn from it and move on.
To take this kind of thinking to the extreme, how long would you give your child to learn to walk? Maybe two months before you decided they can't do it and should give up? Six? One year? Of course you wouldn't, that's ridiculous. You'll want them to keep trying until they get it, no matter how long it takes. Which is why pretty much everyone on the planet can walk. I'm not saying that you should keep trying the same thing over and over again, that's just as silly as not trying in the first place. As Benjamin Franklin once said:
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
If what you're doing isn't getting you any closer to your goal then try something else. What if that doesn't work? Then try sometimes else, and keep trying different things until you find something that does work. If you want to start up your own business, ask somebody out on a date or anything in-between - don't let fear of failure hold you back.
Hypnosis can obviously help with fear of failure, but a much cheaper way is to try following some advice from Steve Pavlina and fail on purpose. You'll save yourself some cash, and get to try some stuff you'd probably never have attempted otherwise.
If you just keep trying to avoid failure, you'll never achieve any real success.
