Combating fear of failing

-   “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed” – Theodore Roosevelt

-      “Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s an experience” – Victoria Holt

-      "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed" - Michael Jordan

-      No one likes to fail (I certainly don't and if you can point me towards someone who does I will be very surprised). However, sometimes no matter how hard you try, you will fail. I entered psychology in order to 'help people.' Thus you might think this means that I always succeed. That my clients always like me and I always give them the correct therapy which helps them to feel better. I quickly learnt this is very untrue. Admittedly I must have been slightly self absorbed to think that I knew how to combat every single type of mental health issue and that the tools I'd learnt in my 23 years would be sufficient. However, by failing to help a client as well as I could, I learnt that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you will sometimes fail. However, what was integral here was how I proceeded from this point. Sure, I had thoughts of giving up, questioning as to why I got into this crappy profession, telling myself how awful and incompetent at this job. These thoughts and feelings are normal, and are exactly the reason as to why people don't like failing. However, from consulting people more experienced than me, receiving feedback, and talking to my friends I learnt to manage this. This single moment influenced my counselling career. I had let my emotions overwhelm me with this certain client and impact on my decision making processes. The single most important thing I learnt here was to assess:is this a life and death situation? to take a deep breath, and formulate a plan with many options. Settle my physical reactions and then decide how I will proceed. I always learnt to accept that no matter what I do, I will sometimes fail, but the most important thing for me professionally is to learn from my mistakes. I also learnt that clients are not there to feed my ego and "like me", they pay me to do a job and whether they like me is irrelevant as long as I get the job done.

    The following is some ways of coping with anxiety, particularly surrounding fear of failing. It has certainly helped me. 

    - It is sometimes easier to avoid a hard task due to fear of failing in the short term; however this means you will never succeed in the long term as unfortunately the only way to succeed is to fail.

-      - The best thing to do is to learn from failure. If you don’t do as well as you hoped, you can use this experience to learn what mistake you made and how you can improve. Always get feedback from people and get help if needed.

-      - Everyone who has succeeded in life has failed many times. This is because this is how you become great. No one is born perfect, and you don’t always do what you are suppose to do in order to succeed. Sometimes other factors get in the way such as relationships, emotions, tiredness and illness. These happen to everyone and can lead to us not performing as well as we can. However, you will never know how successful you can be if you never try. To never try is to never reach your full potential. Its important to weigh up: never succeeding and reaching your full potential vs trying, sometimes failing, learning from the experience and using this to become successful.

-     -  We might try to relieve our anxious thoughts by avoiding a difficult task. The anxiety of ‘failing’, ‘not being good enough’ and ‘what’s the point', 'I’m not going to be successful’ can be enough to make us feel angry and overwhelmed. As a result we give up and distract ourselves with other tasks. We may tell ourselves that we don’t need to meet this challenge and its stupid anyway. However, in the long term, this extends to our everyday life and whenever we are faced with a challenge and become overwhelmed or frustrated; we throw our hands up and avoid the task at hand as this relieves our initial anxiety. 

   - However, to persist is the key, we may feel anxious, but we need to notice our negative thoughts and find ways to combat them. For example we can tell ourselves that “it will not be the end of the world if I fail”, “I don’t know for sure what I have done is rubbish, I can only find out from handing it up and getting feedback.” Most of the time, your anxious thoughts are what makes the situation ten times worse, and if you can combat these thoughts and finish the task then you will often be pleasantly surprised at the result. Its important to weight up initial anxiety versus long term failures. 

   How do I do this?

   

   The following information is from http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/what-is-catastrophizing/

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    - The first step to dealing with Catastrophizing is to recognize when you’re doing it. The sooner you do this, the quicker you’ll be able to start focusing on stopping it. It may be helpful to start recording your negative thoughts to yourself on a pad of paper or little journal (or your PDA or such) that you carry with you at all times. Write down what happened as objectively as possible, what you thought about the situation, and then what your reaction or behaviors were.

    - Over a week’s time, you’ll begin to see a pattern emerge of when you’re most likely to Catastrophize, and some of the thoughts or situations that most likely lead to it.

 - Now that you can see some of the direct cause and effects of your thoughts, you can begin the work on changing them. Every time you now want to Catastrophize a situation, you should answer yourself back in your mind:

“    "Crap, I already made a mistake on this report — I’ll never finish it, or if I do, it’ll be so full of mistakes, it won’t matter. I’m going to fail no matter what.”

     “No, that’s not true. Everybody makes mistakes, I’m only human. I’ll fix this mistake and just try and concentrate a little bit more to try and do better in the future. No teacher is going to fail me for a mistake or two in a report.”

  - Stopping yourself from Catastrophising takes a lot of conscious effort on your part, patience, and time. But if you try these few steps and really start answering yourself back, these irrational thoughts that serve no positive purpose will soon lessen in frequency and strength.