I have a fear of success. Failure, on the other hand, I have no problem with. Being able to fail well will help with reducing self-sabotage, and help you reach your goals quicker.

So, what is failure? The Oxford English dictionary defines failure as: “A failing to occur, be performed, or be produced; an omitting to perform something due or required.” Literally: an action was missed.

To fail is a missed action

Doesn’t that sound so simple? No big deal? We missed an action, or more, is all. We could have missed an expected action, such as not weighing in one week and pretending you haven’t gained weight, or missing a week of running. Perhaps we missed an action we have yet to discover that missing action such as Edison’s “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”, or we wrongly copied a recipe and haven’t realised we missed a step, but the cake came out rock-solid.

As with self-sabotage and fear of success, many don’t want to fail therefore they just don’t show up. Life expectations stay low, never step outside the comfort zone, avoid having to feel something. They don’t want to kick their own arse, they know they’ll beat themselves up. Saying that you don’t know what to do, is another way to stay in your comfort zone. If you don’t know what to do, and don’t look for the answers, then you’re still not moving for ward. The irony there, though, is that by trying to avoid something bad, you risk never feeling something great.

You have complete control over how you view your failure

Failing is all in the mind. What if you set yourself up with a positive mindset ahead of time?
Let’s take running as an example. For most runners it’s all about the personal best – being faster than the time before. A runner has a marathon PB of 5hrs 35. The runner wants to break 5hrs. The next marathon comes along 5 months later, and they run 5hrs 03. It’s fair to say that most runners I know, including me, will be miffed at that extra 3 minutes, not as miffed if it was a few seconds over, but miffed none-the-less. How many of you see taking 32 minutes off the time it takes to run 26.2miles as a failure?

To fail is to learn

You had no problem with failing as a kid. I bet you fell on your bum a lot whilst learning to walk, but you carried on and eventually succeeded. Why? Because your family cheered you on. When you fell, they encouraged you up to try again. They kept cheering. You became confident by trying over and over. Somewhere along the timeline of childhood we learned guilt and shame. It became expected of us to just be able to do something, or to have been shown once and then just know and be proficient. We lost our confidence in trying new things.

How about we make a deal and say:

• that we’ll give it a try, our best shot,
• that we’ll likely slip up, not meet an expectation or two, and if we do,
• that we won’t beat ourselves up,
• we’ll show up for ourselves,
• take a look at how we can improve,
• take a look at what steps we missed,
• be proud of what we DID achieve, and
• try again, but differently.

What are you doing in your life where you are the little kid learning to walk?

Take a look here for how to handle failure.