Does Fear of Failure Can Keep You Stuck?

Fear is one of the most powerful forces in life. It affects the decisions you make, the actions you take, and the outcomes you achieve. Who you are and what you do has at one point or another been influenced by fear. And while the primary role of fear is to protect you, fear very often becomes a significant obstacle that stands between you and your goals. Being successful relies to a large extent on knowing how to leverage fear.

Fear comes in many different forms. There are a variety of things that we are afraid of. Some are very specific, like dogs or spiders, and some are more general, like being afraid to try new things or speaking your mind in front of others. Among these different types of fear, there is one that can have a direct impact on your potential for success: fear of failure.

Fear of failure is the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reaction to the negative consequences you anticipate for failing to achieve a goal. It is the intense worry, the negative thinking, and the reluctance to take action you experience, when you imagine all the horrible things that could happen if you failed to achieve a goal.

Fear of failure can cause many headaches. The psychology literature outlines a whole list of problems related to atychiphobia (the geeky name for fear of failure). In the short-run, fear of failure influences the types of goals you pursue, the kinds of strategies you use to achieve them, and the level of standards you set as indicators of success. When choosing which goals to pursue, people with a higher dose of fear of failure tend to focus their efforts more on preventing losses than achieving gains. For example, they may choose to work overtime because they don’t want to be perceived as slackers by their managers and thus risk getting fired, instead of working overtime to finish a new project that they hope will have a huge impact on their career. In addition, they tend to avoid situations in which they expect they will be evaluated and judged. For example, they may avoid making a sales pitch to an important client, for fear of failing to be persuasive enough to close the deal. Conversely, they may set lower standards for themselves on purpose, even though they know they can do better. In the previous example, they would switch the target from closing the deal, to simply making the phone call. Aiming to simply make the call has a much lower risk of failure than attempting to close a deal. In addition, people with fear of failure create obstacles intentionally, a process called self-handicapping, to undermine their efforts to achieve a goal, so that they can later blame the obstacles, rather than themselves. For example, they may schedule the sales call at lunch, when their prospective client is probably unavailable, so that they can attribute the lack of success to never having connected with the client.

https://caribbeanfever.com/photo/https-trustees-duke-edu-sites-default-files-webform-nominations?context=user
http://www.onfeetnation.com/profiles/blogs/get-coin-master-free-spins-coins-link-100-chapterv1-pdf-3?xg_source=activity
https://www.peeranswer.com/question/5f479c72549e35f918831a51
https://www.mydigoo.com/forums-topicdetail-160721.html
https://www.page2share.com/page/186290/how-to-avoid-failure
https://paiza.io/projects/moBTr13TsRRVqE3KDGW91Q