Fear Of Failure
When throughout our lives we fail on several occasions, the fear of failure appears on the scene . With this fear we live avoiding situations that may lead us again to not achieve the expected success.
In this way, little by little, we move further and further away from our projects, our dreams … We are flooded with a feeling of failure and frustration, I feel “failed” and “frustrated”, “So much effort for what? If I’m going to fail again, why try again? “
And it is together with these feelings where we stay, we stagnate, we abandon…. We try to make ourselves strong in the face of life’s adversity, we try not to bring it up again, we try not to be close to failure anymore, but it is a difficult and painful proposition.
The fear of failure and forgetfulness
It seems that unfairly, on many occasions, life and people remind us of failure again, they tell us about it, and we ask ourselves … “Why don’t they let me forget it and turn the page at once?”
And our reaction is pain, suffering, rage and anger. “Now that I started living without thinking about it, and it was fine …”
However, was it okay? Or did I just want to hide the pain forever, and make myself strong? In reality, as in many emotional processes, what does not heal, leaves its mark. And, on many occasions, although I thought I had accepted it, in reality, I had resigned myself.
Sometimes, I simply tried to make the effort to forget it, hide it, cover it up, not think about it anymore, even though I didn’t finish getting it … Emotional pain is like a wound in our physical body, if we don’t heal it, it will close and heal superficially, but it is likely that inside it is infected.
Then, any friction will hurt, which means that we will feel very sensitive because of that fear of failure that grips us. Something that means that the wound is not well healed.
What to do then?
Frustration is an emotion that makes us avoid what will make us suffer. If we have failed and become frustrated, we are likely to avoid that pain again. Failure is the failed attempt, and this makes us suffer.
However, it is true that this is not always the case. Let us think of projects that, having failed to achieve them, have not made us suffer either. What makes them different? When there is something that we do not achieve, but we know that we have more options and that we can go in more ways, it will be a failure, but we do not feel failed or frustrated.
If we accept that it was not possible, we will learn from that experience, and we will be upset that we did not achieve it, but we will not suffer for it. We will continue to explore different ways to reach our goals, even more motivated to keep going.
However, when we feel like a failure it is because we consider that there was only one chance to achieve it. Then, the fear of failure invades us: “I will never make it”, “I have to resign myself to this truncated life.” And so, we will stop trying.
There are more ways
Every time we fail in our attempt, we will analyze the multiple paths to achieve our projects and our dreams. There is never only one path to achieve our goals.
And so, a failure will be nothing more than a path explored and from which we will learn, among other things, that we have many more to discover. In this way the fear of failure will not appear, we will not avoid continuing to walk, fight, explore … We will continue forward.
It is like this, when despite not achieving it, we will feel proud of ourselves because we will not stop pursuing our desires. In each step we will have grown, new opportunities will have opened up for us, we will have reached unsuspected destinations, sometimes more satisfactory than the goal that moved us.
Life will not stop surprising us and offering us opportunities, as long as we are willing to keep walking, to keep looking for our happiness.
Photo courtesy of Sergey Nivens
