Allie Morgan – Writer & Cancer Survivor

The fear of failure is something that a lot of people are held back by.

I don’t want you to be held back – life is too short and I want you to be going for the things you want in life so today, we’re going to talk about how to use that fear to push you forward. 

What is fear of failure? 

Fear of failure is something that tends to creep up quite soon after you get a brilliant idea or you just get the courage to do that thing you’ve always wanted to do – you’re JUST about to go for it aaaand…all the fears creep in.

The what if’s, the fear of other people’s opinions and judgements. The sickening feeling of ‘what if I put it out there and it absolutely bombs and I look like an idiot?’

Babe, I know.

We’re hardwired to seek approval from others – if you think back to when we were living in caves, we were safer if we were in a tribe. We didn’t want to be on our own so that’s where that fear comes from of other people’s judgements.

And then the fear of failure itself comes from your brain trying to do its job and protect you. So for instance, if you were in a relationship that ended really badly, you might not want to go for another relationship for a while because your brain knows the pain you went through before and it’s like ‘nnnope, not again.’

That’s what fear of failure is – it’s that little voice in your head that says ‘oh but wait, hold on a minute. Don’t get too excited because it might all go very wrong.’ 

It can hold you back or you can take the leap 

This is what I wrote about in my most recent blog post about how fear of failure can be a good thing – essentially, I just like to think of it as a thing, not good or bad – just your brain doing its job.

What YOU do with it is the most important thing – that’s the good or bad thing. If you decide to let it hold you back and not go for anything, it’s not going to be good.

But if you decide to push through those fears and not give a shit anyway, it can be the best thing for you because it takes you out of your comfort zone and pushes you to go further than you’ve ever gone before.

Confidence is also about competence so the more you do something outside of your comfort zone, the more you’ll keep stepping outside it because you know that you’re just building your competence up.

If you decide that this fear is stronger than your dreams, you end up holding yourself back and you’ll never get where you want to be 

Change Your Mindset

You have to start looking at things with a growth mindset – a mindset that sees failures as opportunities to grow.

Without a growth mindset, we let ourselves be beaten down by the things that didn’t turn out as we’d planned and the opinions of others. We end up believing that we don’t have that drive or that spark or that talent that those successful people do.

Truth is, we all have it inside us – we just have to be willing to put ourselves out there and step outside our comfort zone and embrace the opportunities in front of us. Just be aware of those thoughts that are holding you back and get into a good habit of knowing when you’re getting stuck in a fixed mindset.

See it as something to push you forward 

Now what you can do to push through this fear is to notice when that thought is kicking in, realise that it’s just your brain protecting you, and choose the thing that scares you instead – feel the fear and do it anyway.

It might be absolutely terrifying, you might feel all the nerves coming up and that’s natural – that’s just your body’s natural reaction to something being a bit scary. But it’s okay and you can use that nervous excitement to push you forward, to think – ‘no I have got that confidence in myself that I can do this’ and to push through.

You can start doing things that push you out of your comfort zone and I would say to do one thing every day that scares you a bit because the more you do it, the less scary it will become and you’ll be able to level up and move on to something bigger.

So say you wanted to get fit but you were afraid of going to the gym on your own because you were feeling unsure about what all the machines do – much like me when I first went to the gym – start small.

You might start off by doing at home workouts and getting more confident in your body, then you might start going for a run outside your home so you’re feeling more physically fit.

Then you might ask a friend to come with you to the gym, someone who knows the gym well.

After a couple of sessions with them, you’re more familiar with what everything does and you’re already feeling good in your body because you’ve put the work in beforehand, so you feel those nerves walking in on your own but you’re not totally overwhelmed – it’s not as scary as it was before. Set small goals to build up to that big one. 

Note your progress 

Always keep an eye on your progress – look back at what you were journaling about a few months ago and what’s changed in that time or keep a record of your progress towards a certain goal and you’ll see that all the small steps you’ve taken have led you to this place, this moment you’re in now.

You’ve got to look back just to see how far you’ve come and use that momentum to keep pushing you forward.

You’ve got this & I believe in you,

Allie x