Overcome your fear of failure

Nobody likes to fail, and so we tend to procrastinate on these tasks! Overcoming your fear of failure is the hallmark of a successful person. Even the most confident of people can fear failure and put things off. Unfortunately, by continuing to procrastinate, your failure is more likely.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Like most people, I had a fear of public speaking. The thought of me standing in front of people and talking to them had my heart thumping and often brought me out in a cold sweat. For a long time, I was able to procrastinate on public speaking….until I started to lecture at university, where I would stand in front of 200 people for 2 hours.

This was my worst nightmare! Every week I would be up in front of people for up to 8 hours talking to them!

Are you procrastinating and avoiding an important task because you fear failure?

To overcome your fear of failure, there are a number of things that you can do.

• Confront your fear. Confront your fear and work out what you need to do to manage it. Perhaps your fear is a mental block or due to a lack of confidence. Ask yourself what you fear and work on it. Make sure that you work on fear in bite-sized chunks so that you don’t overwhelm yourself.
• Draw up a pro’s and con’s list of the task. The task is something that you are emotionally caught up in and want to avoid. By drawing up a pro’s and con’s list you to look at the fearful task in a more objective manner and reduce the emotional influence on your stress.

• Plan your actions. If you fail to plan then you plan to fail! My fear of public speaking was due to a lack of confidence in front of people. If your fear of failure is rooted in similar causes then plan your way out of your procrastination. For example, I wrote an action plan of the things that I needed to do to become a proficient public speaker. Download your free action plan here.