I'm Frightened of Failure

Dear Jane,

I seem to have a problem with letting my fear of failure keep me from success. My whole life I have had to say 'what if' because when it gets down to going through with something, I get scared and quit. It happens with certain classes, or trying out for a role in a college play, or what I want to do now ... try out for the tennis team.

What do I do? I read books, and articles, and see counselors, but nothing helps?

Rachael

Dear Rachael,

Forcing yourself to face your fears head-on isn't the way forward. If you could do that, you wouldn't be writing to me. So the best -- and most comfortable -- approach is to lower your stress level and gain a new perspective on those fears. Here's how:

List the things which rouse this fear. Take a mild one to start with, and ask yourself, what would realistically happen if you did fail. Would it really be so bad? Imagine you saw someone else failing the same way.

Would you really despise or dislike them? If it was being picked for a team, for instance, and they weren't, wouldn't you just think, ‘Tough luck,’ or, ‘She just wasn't quite good enough.’ You wouldn't think, ‘She's a total failure, no-one will ever like her!’

So don’t put these doomy, unrealistic, all-or-nothing labels on yourself.

See the fear as separate from you. We all have many different potentials, drives, possible ways of reacting and behaving. This fear isn't YOU. It's a strand in your mental tapestry. Give it a name! When you feel it, say, 'Oh, there goes Trembling Nellie again' (or whatever you call it).

And you can go on to ask yourself, 'OK, I know what Trembling Nellie says. Now, what does Strong Rachael say?'

Reduce stress generally with relaxation CDs, doing something like yoga, using simple physical techniques like 7-11 breathing (count 7 as you breathe in, 11 as you breathe out.

By breathing out for longer than you breathe in, you AUTOMATICALLY become less stressed. Taking two or three of these breaths before a difficult situation really helps. And taking even five minutes twice a day to do this breathing will reduce your stress levels generally quite noticeably over a couple of weeks or so. Fifteen minutes is better!

Another quick stress lowerer is to turn your palms and forearms forwards, or facing upwards on your lap if you're sitting. This automatically lowers tension in your shoulders and neck. Get used to taking a couple of 7-11 breaths and unobtrusively letting your palms face forwards every time you feel stressed. Exercise is a great way of working out anxiety. Try just jumping up and down, flailing your arms, till you’re breathless next time you feel a bit panicky.

Calm traumas with Human Givens, EFT, NLP, or EMDR therapy. These are incidents when you were humiliated, failed publicly, goofed off ... Even now, the memory makes your heart pound and your guts clench, and every time you've tried to do something since, that memory and those frightened feelings have unconsciously held you back.

Absolutely avoid counsellors who want to spend time going back into your past to find the causes of the way you feel. Yes, that knowledge may be usefully be fed into good counselling, but this kind of introspecting and worrying about yourself is stressful and depressing.

Right now, you'll be better off without traditional counselling or self-help books. Find outside things to get interested and involved with instead. Any time you catch yourself worrying about your fear of failure ... DO SOMETHING to distract yourself.

Don’t want things so much! You'll have noticed that the more you want something, the more the fear of failure surfaces. Your imagination goes on from the particular goal to your whole personality and future. Joining the tennis team, for you, will be hugely bound up with your general success as a person. No wonder you're frightened.

So DON’T visualise how great it would be to achieve your goal. Instead, starve your imagination. Don't think what it would be like to have succeeded! Just plan out the steps you need to take, and then ... DON'T look at the whole staircase. Don't think about what's at the top. Just keep your eyes on the next step.

If you do that, Rachael, I'm sure you'll find that those steps can really take you places – without anxiety.
Jane

Jane Firbank's site, http://www.secretsofchange.com, has over 100 fascinating and helpful problem letter replies, plus scores of articles and book reviews.

Jane Firbank, BSc (Psych), HG Dip, GHR, is a psychotherapist in private practice in London, England where she also regularly writes and consults on psychological matters for the Press, TV and radio.

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