Everyone has felt the fear of failure. You might have felt the fear that you won’t be accepted into your school of choice, the fear that you will fail a tough class, or the fear that your dream job will forever be out of your reach. It is normal to feel afraid, especially for high achievers who are used to success. The problem is, this fear can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you allow yourself to be paralyzed by the dread of failure, you won’t be able to make the leaps of faith necessary to grow and succeed. The best way to avoid this indecision is, paradoxically, to embrace your failures.
Take A Step
Do you have an idea for a new personal project or a great business that you want to turn from a dream to reality? Get started before you think you’re ready. It can be easy to put off taking action by disguising your procrastination as preparation. The perfect can be the enemy of the good, so don’t try to make sure that everything is lined up exactly before getting started. Even if it’s just a soft launch of your new project’s website, it is the first step in your next thousand-mile journey.
A recently published article in Forbes called Career Switchers: Stop Waiting To Be Chosen outlines how to move forward when trying something scary and new. The article is written from the point of view of changing careers, but the advice is good for changing majors, changing schools, or even just starting up a new personal project. The author lays out six things you should be doing to ensure success in your transition, but all the advice revolves about the idea that you should be proactive. Don’t sit around and wait for opportunities; create them for yourself.
Keep Moving Forward
At some point, one of your big leaps will end in a hard fall. It is hard not to feel bad when you fail, but the faster you can move past it and start trying again, the easier your journey will be. Failure can be hard to deal with for any high achiever but learning to embrace it and work through it is a valuable life skill. You will need to escape from your comfort zone in order to be successful. Treat your fear like a compass, letting it guide you to the big leaps you will need to make to do something great.
If you learn to treat failure as a pivot point as opposed to a dead end, you will stop associating your failures with a feeling of dread. Just remember: as long as you are trying, you are moving forward. Did You Fail At Something? Good – Do Something Else by Darius Foroux outlines a good way to take your failures and focus on the positive outcomes. By focusing on the positive and continuing to try, you are setting yourself up to be successful in life.