Don’t be scared to fail

Last week I talked about having a long list of goals. This week is for those who are struggling with coming up with any goals at all. 

It is likely that one of the obstacles to setting your sites on achieving new things is due to a fear of failure. 

Failure is uncomfortable, painful, and scary. Of course we don’t want to do it. The first tenant of the motivational triad our species developed hundreds of thousands of years ago is avoid pain. And that means avoiding failure. 

But most of the pain of failure is in how we treat ourselves about it. Yes, some failures result in a loss of income or relationships that are lynchpins of our livelihoods, but most of the time it’s just embarrassing. 

Failure means we committed to do something and we got different results than anticipated. It can be as neutral as that, and yet we use this as an opportunity to beat up on ourselves. Call ourselves bad names. And say things about our ability that predict more failure. 

But what if failure only mean that you did something and got different results than anticipated? What if you treated it as an opportunity to learn and grow, and that’s it? It would be less scary then, no? 

And if it’s less scary, maybe it would be easier to try.