Being afraid of failure

I wanted to share with you something I experienced during the last two weeks. I had to go to a job interview and to do two oral presentations. I must admit that I'm really bad at both. Unexpectedly though I did quite well at all of them.

I realized that what was giving me some stress before oral presentation and the interview. Of course, I was always prepared for them but there was always something missing that kept me from performing at the level I wanted to perform. I realized that stress what keeping me away from doing that. So I asked myself why I was so stressed. I suddenly realized that I was afraid of failing that's why I was always stressed. So I started asking myself why I was so scared of missing the mark. I realized that all that stress wasn't really related to my performance that I thought I could do or that I was actually delivering. All the trouble I was encountering was because of my cognitive pattern of how I thought I was suppose to an oral presentation. I was afraid of failing because I was focusing much more on the result rather than on the process.

So here's what I did. I started to believe that I COULD NOT fail and even if I was delivering a speech a little less good than I expected, it wouldn't matter. So that's what I did I convinced myself before the interview (which was the first of the three problematic event), surprisingly all the stress went away. I was focusing on the job at hand and I even made the interviewer laugh with a clever comment. I convinced myself so profoundly that I couldn't fail that I did super well at the job interview and did both oral presentation without stress. It was great!

So I think that stress is just due to being scared of failure. Once you can convince yourself that you can't fail and you stop focusing so much on result rather than on the process you are much more happy and you perform at a higher level. Also experiencing self confidence doesn't hurt at all.


p.s. I must admit that I got a little help into thinking like this. I highly suggest that you watch the following video on happiness from TED. The process into thinking like the speaker's ideology was kinda there in my mind but I couldn't explain it as clearly as he did. Once I saw his video, it all came together and I got an illumination. It's a bit related to Vroom's motivation theory on expectations..
Srikumar Rao: Plug into your hard-wired happiness | Video on TED.com

I had something very similar. That I call procrastination, ever since I was young my parents would punish me for the smallest failures. So as I grew up I with the belief that I had to be perfect. Which resulted me never even starting all the great projects I'd have in mind. I would just imagine how awesome I'd do it, but never do anything.

I understand how the belief that nothing is failure but really only a temporary set back, can help someone relieve stress and anxiety. But I found it to be even more useful to reverse engineer that belief. Now i feel more anxiety and stress from the thought of missing out on an opportunity rather than anticipating my humiliation of facing my reality. So when I get second thoughts about doing something. Something that I know I will regret from inaction, I get a heavy feeling of dread in my chest in about 30 seconds. Usually that 30 seconds is enough for me to work up the initiative to turn around and do what I initially found so intimidating, and just jump right in.

The only draw back was if I missed out, I'd kick myself for the rest of the day for not acting sooner.

I do not necessarily see fear of failure as much of a problem as those do that fear it. Personally, I do not mind a little failure from time to time, the occasional failure keeps me in check with myself and my assessment of things.

However, I am in an environment to where our director has a fear of failure and it has negative affects on others. In this case, the director tends to take over anything from the subordinates that he does not necessarily like the idea of and do it his way, or give an order to do it a certain way, which at times this action alone is the cause of failure. The director in this case, a lot of times bases his decisions off of what he thinks and not what he knows and the facts at hand. If he hires someone to do a job, he needs to let them do it, and not be telling them to do it and then take it away when its not the way he would have done it.

Just my .02.

i might wanna try that. i feel failure a lot, but it's sort of weird. i was a gifted kid growing up, and also routinely harassed by the other students at the school. so "being gifted" was the one thing i had that made me feel better. except now i have RIDICULOUSLY high standards for myself... i'm trying to teach myself that i don't have to be the best at everything, and it's impossible to do so anyway. i know it sounds like i'm stuck-up, but i don't act like i'm better than other people. i'm just too hard on myself