How To Overcome Fear of Failure: 9 Helpful Practices

Hitting a baseball is one of the most difficult challenges in all of sports. The batter needs to read what kind of pitch it is, gauge where the ball will end up, and decide if it will be hittable, all within a matter of milliseconds. There are a few things that can result in a missed hit—a surprising pitch, a noise, a misread, a gust of wind—but one thing that will guarantee the batter doesn’t hit the baseball is deciding not to swing. 

Fear of failure works the same way. Hesitating or worrying that you might fail guarantees missed opportunities. Luckily, the fear of failure is something we can recognize and overcome. As hockey legend Wayne Gretzky—and The Office’s Michael Scott—once said, “You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

Let’s dive into how you can reduce your fear of failure, replace it with an innate sense of curiosity about what lies ahead for you, and regain the confidence to try new things.

How does fear of failure manifest?

Fear of failure can present itself in various ways, and it often pairs with low confidence or high self-doubt. Here are just a few of the ways this can manifest:

• Procrastination. If incessantly putting important tasks off is a part of your daily life, it may be a sign that you fear failure. Some people might simply just not want to work, but it’s also possible that you’re pushing a task back over and over so you don’t have to face failure once you give it a real try.

• Avoidance. Similar to procrastination, outright avoidance can signal a fear of failing. You may find yourself avoiding taking on challenging projects that you’re actually interested in.

• Negative self-talk. The voice in your head telling you that you aren’t good enough or that you can’t succeed can be a sign of the fear of failure. One cognitive behavioral therapy technique you can use here is to begin assessing why this inner critic of yours feels the need to weigh in on everything you do.

• Fixating on the worst-case scenario. Though many small business owners and entrepreneurs are great at preparing for the worst, worrying about failure can manifest as a true fixation on a catastrophic outcome. You might become so trapped in analysis paralysis that you never even truly get started.

• Downplaying goals and desires. People who feel afraid to fail may adjust their lives accordingly and shrink their goals, so that they don’t have to confront the possibility of failure. This is a form of self-sabotage.

• Panic attacks. Though panic attacks result from all sorts of stress and anxiety, an extreme fear of failure is a common cause. Physical symptoms include increased heart rate, chest tightness, trouble breathing, and feeling an impending sense of doom.

What causes fear of failure?

• Perfectionism
• Past experiences
• Comparison
• Conditional self-worth

Circumstances might trigger a person’s fear of failure, like a job interview or a big marketing deadline. But for these to trigger someone in the first place, there’s often a root cause. Here are a few of the underlying issues that can cause a fear of failure: 

Perfectionism

The fear of failure and perfectionism are not the same thing, but they often go together: An insistence on perfection can lead to a fear of failure. If you’re too fixated on making something perfect, the worry that you’ll fall short can hinder you from making anything at all. As the saying goes, “Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good.”

Past experiences

Most people have experienced an embarrassment or a scarring failure of one sort or another in their lives. For some, the memories of that situation trigger a fear response related to repeating that past mistake. Whether it happened at a young age or more recently, dealing with these experiences can be hard to do. Still, it’s important to remember that the present is not the past, and you can learn from those past failures to avoid similar future scenarios.

Comparison 

Social media saturates our lives, so it’s easier than ever to compare ourselves to everyone on our feeds. It’s important to remember that those comparisons aren’t just counterproductive, they can also lead to negative thoughts and cognitive distortions that are simply inaccurate. Whether it’s your work, your success, or personal experiences, comparison can be the thief of joy, leaving us trapped in envy instead of allowing us to experience gratitude and self-confidence.

Conditional self-worth

The American Psychological Association published a study specifying how shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride skew our ability to self-evaluate objectively. These emotions cause us to make our self-worth contingent on external success. This kind of conditional self-worth—measuring your value by a self-imposed measure of success or failure—can be exhausting and difficult to overcome.

How to overcome the fear of failure

• Redefine success
• Write it down
• Be a novice
• Examine your fear
• Learn from mistakes
• Become more comfortable with rejection
• Don’t be afraid of “good enough”
• Update later
• Build community

If you think you might fear failure, don’t fret. There are several techniques for confronting that fear and assuaging your worries. 

Redefine success

It makes sense that failure means something different for everyone. So does success. The good news is we can always move the goalposts when it comes to either.

On an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, Aishwarya Iyer, founder of olive oil company Brightland, speaks about setting realistic goals and seeing her potential in a new light. At first, she says, she was focusing on the negative—thinking about what she didn’t have rather than considering how to use the resources she did have. 

Iyer was eventually able to subvert this negative framing by shifting her expectations: The company, she says, “could either turn into something huge, or maybe I can sell a thousand bottles in eight months and I’ll be really proud of myself.” This kind of open-minded approach to taking risks and setting different ranges of goals can be a powerful way to allay the fear of failing and understand that success comes in many forms. 

Write it down

If fear of failure is keeping you from taking on necessary tasks, try getting it out of your head and onto paper. Describe the situation, write about which steps you’re avoiding and why you’re worried. You may find that becoming more aware of the problem makes it less scary. If you can define what scares you, it becomes a lot easier to tackle than a nebulous cloud of anxiety in your head.

Be a novice

If you maintain a fixed mindset about who you are or what you should be able to accomplish, you’ll be at war with yourself any time you don’t measure up. By contrast, if you adopt a beginner’s mind or growth mindset, you’ll learn to view “failure” as one more opportunity to recalibrate and reframe on a path toward personal success.

National Public Radio host Ira Glass has spoken about what he calls the taste-talent gap. In short, people get interested in a new skill—whether that’s creative or entrepreneurial—because they have good taste and good ideas. 

But for the first couple of years, they’re beginners. So naturally, what they’re creating is not up to the standards that got them into the skill in the first place. The only way through this taste gap is by moving forward until your work eventually catches up with your taste.

Examine your fear

Ask yourself: What are you really afraid of? According to Aishwarya, “A lot of impostor syndrome actually comes from fear. So what I started doing was really digging into what I was afraid of.” Aishwarya peeled her own fear back layer by layer, asking herself, “What am I afraid of? Disappointment. Whose disappointment?” and so on. Once she identified the source of her fear, she was able to address it and move forward with increased confidence.

Learn from mistakes

As popular YouTube Chef Wil Yeung says on an episode of Shopify Masters, “If you can take something away that’s transferable, it isn’t really a failure.” No matter what you do in life, you will fail at something at some point. A successful person tends to embrace these so-called failures as a way to learn and finds ways to apply those learnings. “What I fear most is the unfulfilled potential, the thought of getting to the end of your life and being like, ‘Man, I wish I’d tried that,’” Wil says. 

Become more comfortable with rejection

What do Agatha Christie, Stephen King, and Dr. Seuss have in common? They were all rejected and written off by publishers a lot before becoming wildly successful. Rejection is often a scary prospect that we are not well-prepared for, but it’s also a natural part of finding the right audiences and partnerships. 

Instead of seeing each rejection as an indictment of your worth or a reason to lack confidence, focus on the lessons you can learn and use rejections to refine your product, partnerships, and requests. 

Don’t be afraid of “good enough”

If you run a small business, perfection can be the enemy of doing anything at all. For example, if you’re working on a new product, it’s healthy to want the mailer envelopes to be beautiful. But if a small detail like that is holding up the release of the product, consider living with the good—not perfect—envelopes as a first step. 

Update later

Most decisions aren’t permanent—remember that you can adjust and refine your work and decisions as you learn more or have greater bandwidth. For example, you may need a website banner, but does it need to be designed for posterity? You can likely put something up, see whether it’s working, and update it later—don’t let the fear of making the wrong choice keep you from acting at all. 

Build community

No business lives in a vacuum. Commerce is all about the relationships between people: customers, business owners, distributors, and competitors. One of the strongest tools you have for self-improvement and confronting challenges is your ability to work through problems with your community. If you’re worried about failing at something, talk to somebody who has already failed at it and figure out how they ultimately succeeded.