How to Let Go of Fear of Failure

A recent email from a reader asked the question, “My child keeps getting in his own way in his [sport]. He has a fear of failure! So, what can I do about it?” In this article, I’ll discuss ways in which young people (and all people, for that matter) can let go of their fear of failure.

Let me preface my thoughts by saying that there are entire books devoted to fear of failure and how to overcome it. In severe cases, months of psychotherapy are required. My point is that, as with most things in life, there are no magic pills or quick fixes. At the same time, if you or one of your children has a fear of failure, there are some things you and they can do to relieve the burden of fear of failure and begin to pursue success rather than avoid failure.

What Parents Can Do

A basic tenet of mine about child development is that “children become the messages they get the most.” What this means is that children weren’t born with a fear of failure. Instead, children develop their attitudes toward and beliefs about failure from the world around them.

Some of those harmful messages about failure, no doubt, come from our popular culture, overly intense coaches or teachers, and peers.

But, as sad as it is to say, fear of failure in children usually comes from their parents. Parents contribute to feat of failure in three ways. First, you react to your own failures by getting angry or despondent. Second, you send direct messages to your children that failure is simply unacceptable (“You better win today”). And, third, you react emotionally when your children don’t live up to your expectations — for example, getting angry at them after a bad game or grade. In all three cases, the message they get is “I can’t lose or I’ll really upset my parents.” The subtext of this statement, which is so difficult for parents to believe, is “If I lose, my parents won’t love me.” And there is nothing more fear-inducing in children than that.

But here’s the good news: If you can send unhealthy messages to your children, you also have the power to send healthy ones. And that is where you can first begin to turn your children’s fear of failure around.

Here are some practical steps you can take to ensure that your messages about success and failure are healthy:

Other practical things you can do include:

Here’s an example to help you understand how this process can work. A parent client of mine — I’ll call her Deb — developed an intense fear of failure from growing up with a demanding father who expected only As in school and victories in sport. Though she became quite successful in her career, she was never happy or satisfied with her efforts. Early in her children’s lives, Deb realized that she was instilling that same fear in her children (she talked about their grades and results all the time, got really nervous before her kids’ performances, and was really upset if they didn’t perform up to her expectations) and was determined not to do to her children what her father did to her. So, Deb took several steps to change her behavior and help her kids develop a healthy relationship with failure (some failure is inevitable and is actually essential for long-term success). First, she stopped talking about results around her children. Second, Deb reminded herself constantly that the way to best support her kids’ goals was to emphasize their efforts and what it took succeed. Third, before every performance, she only said, “I love you” to her children and, after, whether they did well or not, she gave them a big hug, said “I love you,” and asked them what they wanted to eat. The end result? Not only did her kids start enjoying themselves more, performing better, and getting improved results in their sports, arts, and school lives, but Deb found that she was more relaxed and had more fun in her support of them.

What People Can Do

Reality test perceptions. Fear of failure is about the perceptions that you hold about failure. For the vast majority people, those perceptions are entirely disconnected from the reality of their lives. You perceive that bad things will happen if you fail, but the reality is that nothing particularly bad, aside from some disappointment, will likely result from most failure.

The main causes of fear of failure include disappointing others, being perceived by others as a failure, and having to conclude that all of your efforts have been a waste of time. Yet, I’m going to argue that none of these things will happen. You can challenge these perceptions by asking your family and friends if they will be disappointed in you (and, as a result, love you less), realizing that the most successful people in all walks of life failed frequently and monumentally on the way to success, and that you will gain far more than you will lose from your failures and learn many essential lessons that will help you in all aspects of your life. So, I encourage you to reality test those perceptions and find out if your fears will come true (I’m pretty sure they won’t).

Take risks. The very nature of life is that you cannot achieve your goals without taking risks. You won’t find real success unless you put yourself out there and “lay it on the line.” The problem is that when you take risks, you may fail. But, if you don’t take risks, you won’t reach your goals, which is the worst kind of failure.

I encourage you to make a commitment to taking risks for two reasons:

  1. To show you that you will be okay if you do fail.
  2. That when you take risks, good things will happen most of the time.

You should start small; for example, take risks in situations in which failure isn’t that bad, and slowly increase your risk taking in more important situations (e.g., job interviews, marriage proposals). In doing so, you get comfortable with taking risks, see that the downsides aren’t so down, and upsides are really up.

Adopt the “F&%# it” attitude. The “F&%# it” attitude (sorry for the bad language) means not caring too much about the results. It means being able to accept whatever results you have if you give your best effort and pursue your goals with commitment, confidence, and courage.

Take a leap of faith. Because there is no certainly in life, if you really want to overcome your fear of failure and achieve your goals you must take a leap of faith. The leap of faith begins with the conviction that you don’t want to go down the path that you’re currently on any longer. The leap of faith continues with, well, faith, that if you let go of your fear of failure and give your best effort, good things will happen. The leap of faith involves having a basic belief in yourself, your capabilities, and your goals. Recognize also that some misgivings are a normal part of the process — you can never be 100 percent sure that things will work out the way you want.

You must also understand that this leap of faith is not blind faith. Rather, you will have prepared yourself for the leap by preparing yourself to succeed; for example, by preparing for an interview or being on a conditioning program for an upcoming running race.

Take your shot. Taking your shot is inherently risky, but it is far better to take your shot and lose than to never take your shot at all. You have only one chance at life; there are no do-overs. At the end of your year, career or life, there is one emotion and one question you don’t want to have to face. First, you don’t want to feel regret, which will certainly come if you don’t take your shot. Second, you don’t want to ask yourself, “I wonder what could have been?” Win or lose, success or failure, you want to be able to say to yourself, “I left it all out there.” You may feel some disappointment if it didn’t work out that day. But you will also feel a degree of satisfaction knowing that you took your shot and gave it your all because, ultimately, that’s all you can do..

The great thing about all of these steps to overcome fear of failure is that they build on one another. The more you do to overcome your fear of failure, the easier it becomes. And, as you do so, you will learn two important lessons. First, failure is fleeting and you will long outlive it. Second, when you let go of your fear of failure, you will be more successful than ever, will likely achieve the goals that you want so dearly to achieve, and will experience far more meaning, satisfaction, and joy in your life’s endeavors.

Featured image: Shutterstock

How Do We Humans Ever Make Good Decisions?

It’s a wonder that good decisions are ever made by the species known as Homo sapiens. The reality is that the cards are stacked against us whenever we are faced with choices, especially when the decisions are of consequence. Think about all of the horrendously bad decisions that have been made in recent history and how obviously bad they look in our rear-view mirrors. The Iraq War, securitizing mortgages, Congress not voting for background checks on gun purchases, another season of The Bachelor, the list goes on. And bad decisions don’t just occur at the highest levels of government or business; rather, everyday folks can make appalling decisions as well, whether getting married to that particular person (50% of marriages end in divorce), wearing those low-cut jeans, or buying a Hummer.

The fact is that humans are behind the eight ball from the get-go when it comes to making decisions. Children are wholly ill-equipped to for decision making. They lack knowledge, experience, and perspective. Children are myopic, impulsive, and easily persuaded. It doesn’t get much better during adolescence, when teenagers are driven by raging hormones, underdeveloped self-identities, and peer and cultural pressure.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle is neurological, where the pre-frontal cortex — the part of the brain associated with executive functioning — doesn’t fully develop until the early twenties (and sometimes never!). Executive functioning directly influences decision making because it regulates, controls, and manages our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. It affects our reactions to new, ambiguous, and difficult situations. It helps us to weigh risks and rewards and short- and long-term consequences. Executive functioning assists us in planning, organizing, and executing decisions and, importantly, it can prevent us from making rash and potentially harmful decisions. We see the absence of well-developed executive functioning in our consumer culture in which people spend money they don’t have or go into debt to buy something (e.g., an iPhone, a new car, a pair of Manolo Blahnik stilettos) they can ill afford.

It doesn’t get any easier as adults to make good decisions either. A wide range of research has demonstrated that we are often at the mercy of psychological, emotional, social, and situational influences when we make decisions. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner in economics, has demonstrated the powerful effect that cognitive biases have on our decision making. Cognitive biases involve the tendency to draw conclusions and make decisions based on limited information or self-interest. An extensive body of research has demonstrated that these biases can lead to irrational decisions at every level of society. A common example that we see constantly in our current political climate is the confirmation bias, which involves the tendency to seek out and interpret new information that affirms our closely held beliefs.

Our decision making is also influenced by our emotional states and social world in ways both overt and subtle, making us appear quite fickle in what we decide. For example, feeling stressed or rushed alters our decisions. The decisions we make are affected by our mood. We make different decisions based on whether we are feeling happy, contemplative, or disgusted. As considerable research on peer pressure and groupthink has demonstrated, our decisions are also significantly influenced by social forces, whether friends and family, cultural messages, or societal norms.

Another thing I learned recently is that emotionally laden information (i.e., information that is threatening in some way) goes directly to the emotional center of the brain, including the amygdala and related structures that are connected to our survival instinct and fight-or-flight reactions that evolved from our early forbearers. This connection isn’t surprising given the role that our emotions play in our survival; we need to receive and act on threatening information right away or we may die.

Unfortunately, the rapid decision making associated with triggering the fight-or-flight response that served humans well during primitive times is generally ineffective at helping us make good decisions about complex issues in modern times. And emotionally relevant decisions are the ones that are usually the most important and most necessary to get right. What is even more unsettling is that there are no direct neurological pathways to the prefrontal cortex; all emotional information goes through the primitive emotional brain. So, the pre-frontal cortex is at a severe disadvantage in contributing to decision making because the information it receives is “old news,” secondhand, and tainted by emotions. For example, as anyone who has ever been in love (or thought they were) knows, that powerful and pleasant emotion can make us do truly stupid things.

We can only conclude that we humans are always going to struggle to make good decisions, and we have a long history documenting just that. Yet somehow we do find ways to make good decisions, whether buying a Prius, not investing with Lehman Brothers, or not popping the question when you’ve had several glasses of wine.

With such a strong current pulling us in the direction of bad decisions, what can we do to increase our chances of making good decisions? Here are a few strategies:

Of course, there is no way we can completely resist all of the genetic, neurological, psychological, emotional, and social forces that impact our decision making. But these few simple steps can prevent us from making truly appalling decisions like, say, attacking North Korea or watching the latest music video from the South Korean pop star, Psy.

Featured image: Shutterstock

Time Out!

Mindfulness
Illustrations by Shout

At Mathews Elementary School in Austin, Texas, 10 fifth grade girls are sitting cross-legged on the music room floor with closed eyes and hands folded in their laps, waiting for the egg timer to go off. Jeanne Demers, 47, a campus coordinator for GENaustin—the Girls Empowerment Network—is overseeing this “mindfulness” exercise, which is intended to give today’s text-crazy, over-stimulated, media-saturated kids a quiet, still moment in their hectic days. One girl swings her hair around, another peeks at her friends, but most of them look peaceful. When the egg timer goes off, they journal about what went through their minds during the three-minute “mindful listening” exercise.

Demers, a pretty, bright-eyed woman who looks a bit like Annette Bening, reports that this peacefulness did not come right away. “It was a hard sell at first, suggesting quiet and stillness to some of the girls I work with.”

Demers is trained in something called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), a technique developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The Mathews girls took to mindful practice with interest and openness, but when instructing girls in some of her schools to “put on their quiet, still bodies and sit like queens,” they made every possible excuse why they couldn’t sit quietly with their eyes closed, alone with their own thoughts, for even one minute. They claimed it was “really awkward” and tried escaping to the bathroom, which showed Demers “how much they actually needed this!” Today, when she comes once a week with her Tibetan bowl (“the girls jockey for who gets to ring it this week”) and egg timer, “they won’t let me not do it.” Besides a bit of quiet time, what mindfulness really gives them, she has learned, is the ability to self-regulate their feelings and behavior by giving them a relationship with their own minds. “That,” says Jeanne Demers, “is social intelligence.”

When our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they did not declare that all men are created equal and mindful, but they might well have in light of this growing phenomenon. “Mindfulness” in the form of meditation, yoga, centering prayer, and other mind-body practices, is sweeping across our stressed-out land like a great breath of fresh air. In addition to a growing number of public school districts, major corporations, prison systems, healthcare organizations, arms of the U.S. military—even our representatives on Capitol Hill—are turning to mindfulness practices to help meet the demands of our hyperkinetic world.

According to the World Health Organization, the yearly cost of stress to American businesses is as high as $300 billion. Over the past 30 years, self-reported levels of stress have increased 18 percent for women and 25 percent for men. By all accounts, we have never been more maxed out or deficiently attentive in our nation’s history. Fortunately, help is on the way. “Mindfulness is the next great movement in the United States,” I’m told by Congressman Tim Ryan (D-Ohio). The author of A Mindful Nation, Ryan has become the foremost crusader for higher consciousness on Capitol Hill. When I ask the congressman whether mindfulness practice isn’t a bit, well, esoteric, for mainstream America, Ryan, a good-old-boy type with an easy manner, lets out a good laugh. “Go tell that to the Marines,” he says. “Go tell that to corporations like Proctor and Gamble, Target, General Mills. There is nothing esoteric about it. Mindfulness is completely simple. We’re talking about watching the breath here. There’s nothing un-American about that!”

Last year, Ryan founded what’s known as the Quiet Time Caucus on Capitol Hill. Once a week, 30 minutes of quiet time is made available in the speaker’s chapel just off the rotunda for anyone who wants it. The caucus has been a great success among members of both parties. Ryan explains, “There are no rules. You can meditate, you can pray, or stare into space. The only rule is you can’t talk.” He hopes that learning to be quiet together will help members of our gridlocked government to reconnect and find solutions to the nation’s problems. “There’s a great deal of frustration in Washington right now,” Ryan reminds me. “When our lawmakers can come together, and approach their jobs with a touch of mindfulness, everyone is bound to benefit.”

A mindfulness movement on Capitol Hill? What’s going on here? Something long overdue but not out of the ordinary, if you listen to advocates of the practice. “Mindfulness is an inherent human ability—something that we all have—to be fully attentive to where we are and what we are doing at any given moment,” says Barry Boyce, editor-in-chief of Mindful magazine.

“It’s a methodology that anyone can use,” adds Sharon Salzberg, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. “You don’t have to have a belief system. It requires no faith or ideology. Mindfulness is as simple as watching your breath.” When she and her colleagues Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein returned from their travels in Asia 35 years ago and began informally sharing meditation practices learned from Buddhist teachers (“just because it was helping us so much”), mindfulness was a movement catering to the chosen few. Today, Salzberg’s nonstop travel schedule takes her to public schools, domestic violence shelters, hospitals, financial institutions, programs to help international humanitarian aid workers, and more. “I never thought I’d live to see the day,” Salzberg admits. “It’s amazing to see what’s happening.”

At Google, Chade-Meng Tan, one of the company’s earliest engineers (and founder of their Search Inside Yourself Program) compares this mainstreaming of “mind fitness” to the early days of the physical fitness movement in the U.S. “In the beginning, fitness was just for ‘nuts,’” says Meng (as Tan likes to be called). “Then in the 1920s, after it was studied, it became an established field. People knew it was good for them and learned how to do it. This revolution will happen in the same way. Mindfulness is ‘meta-fitness.’”

Hundreds of studies conclude that when we spend regular intervals being quiet, emptying our minds, relaxing our nervous systems, and raising awareness of what’s going on between our ears, we are, indeed, happier, healthier, more competent, helpful, empathic, and creative-minded people. Research suggests that mindfulness practices are useful in the treatment of pain, stress, anxiety, depressive relapse, disordered eating, and addiction.

Using the fMRI machine, neuroscientists have deduced that engagement in mindful thinking causes what they call a “left shift” in the brain. This results in increased activation of the brain’s left frontal regions, a process associated with more positive emotional states. Richard Davidson, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist and researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has studied the effects of meditation on the brain for 30 years. “Mindfulness practices can actually change the function and structure of the brain,” Davidson explains. “We have the ability to regulate both attention and emotion, both of which are more flexible and plastic than we had previously considered. In other words, our behavior can literally help shape the structure and functioning of our own brains.”

Proponents of mindfulness hope that practice will ultimately lead to paradigmatic shifts in how we do business. According to Meng, mindfulness is perfectly compatible with a more enlightened approach to capitalism. Yes, it’ll always be a dog-eat-dog world, but “people play sports among friends,” he points out. “It’s competitive but not in a negative way. The key is to compete in ways that consciously create the greater good. We must remember that the human mind can be fundamentally upgraded in a way that’s good for the individual, good for business, and good for the world all at once.”

“Finding the win-win-win is the way,” agrees Janice Marturano, a vice-president at General Mills and now head of the Institute for Mindful Leadership. “People today are double-booked and living on auto pilot. What I hear over and over again from leaders around the world, when they’re asked what the one thing is that they most need to be the kind of leader they want to be, they all say space. When we begin to transform our organizations and communities, we also transform the way in which we meet our lives.” Marturano suggests that we begin by taking what she calls “purposeful pauses” during the day. “Purposeful pauses don’t add time to your day,” Marturano is quick to acknowledge, “but they do encourage us to find those moments in the day when we can reset. The body gets rest, the mind gets rest, and this space makes a big difference in how exhausted we are at the end of the day.”

Facing a record suicide rate and thousands of veterans seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress, the U.S. military has begun testing a series of brain calming exercises called Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training (or M-Fit). “The data support it,” retired Major General Melvin Spiese told NBC news. Spiese was convinced after looking at the scientific research and taking M-Fit himself. “While teaching troops to shoot makes them a better warfighter, teaching mindfulness makes them a better person by helping them to decompress, which could have lasting effects,” he went on to say. Such as performing more effectively on the battlefield. Such as improving cognitive function. “It’s like doing pushups for the brain,” Major Spiese has said.

Back in Austin, Jeanne Demers is inspired about going even further with mindfulness practice with her clubGEN girls next year. “It’s exciting,” she says, “because they get it. They’re like little scientists, these girls, observing and noticing what they’re giving their attention to. That ability allows for so much—in every aspect of their lives. It’s a total game changer.”