Confidence to overcome a fear of failure

September 30, 2024|Kim's Blog, Management Skills, Relationship Management|

At the recent MBL training workshop on Confidence at Work several delegates commented that they avoided things (such as, talking to colleagues, speaking up in meetings, presenting and attending networking events) as they were afraid of failing. I explore common work situations where we might experience Imposter Syndrome or fear failure. And consider what we might do to reduce that fear. Confidence to overcome a fear of failure.

Situations where we fear failure

Some delegates said they refrained from sharing their ideas unless 100% confident they were right. Others said they were concerned about whether others would judge them if they didn’t say or do things completely right. As well as a fear of negative evaluation by others, there were traces of perfectionism.

A perfectionist is someone who has to get everything right – they have excessively high standards. Perfectionists have difficulty letting things go and varying standards to the time available and the effort needed.

Perfectionists sometimes appear to be control freaks (aspects of this and the resulting controlling behaviour are explored here What do you do when your boss is a micro-managing control freak? (kimtasso.com)). Perfectionists often have unrecognized fears and needs – they are motivated by a fear of failure and are never satisfied by achievements.

We talked about the difference between self-confidence (what we feel inside) and confidence (what we project externally). And learned that often self-confidence issues can stem from self-esteem issues. How your self-esteem develops is explored here Be more confident and convey confidence – top tips (kimtasso.com). And this is a well-known book on the subject Book review – Creating self-esteem by Lynda Field (kimtasso.com). Self-doubt is also one of the topics explored in this excellent book: Dr Julie Smith (Mental Health Guidance) (kimtasso.com)

Fear of failure when learning new things

We all have to learn new things all the time. Most professions require even the most senior people to continue to learn throughout their careers – with professional rules about Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and Continuous Professional Education (CPE).

Learning extends beyond acquiring knowledge – it involves practice. And reflection. Boost training effectiveness by incorporating learning theory (kimtasso.com).

Inevitably when we do something for the first time there’s a possibility we may not get it 100% right. Remember when you learned to walk and drive. Practice makes perfect. We need to develop a growth mindset Developing a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck (youtube.com)

Fear of failure in conversations

Some people fear failure when talking to their colleagues – especially if those colleagues are more senior and powerful than themselves. Developing your communication skills will help.

We talked about how to convey confidence in conversations and tips included: moderating the pace (not too fast), increasing the volume, lowering the pitch of your voice and being clear about your few key points and what you want from the person.

This book offers a simple, practical framework to help you in work conversations How to start conversations that get results (kimtasso.com)

Breaking into conversations when others dominate the conversation is discussed here: Confidence – How to get a word in when people keep talking (kimtasso.com)

Fear of failure in networking

Another common situation that can generate unease is the prospect of networking. As children we are told “Don’t talk to strangers” and then we enter the world of work and are encouraged to go out and talk to strangers! So most people feel a little social anxiety at the prospect of meeting lots of new people.

There are many resources to help you feel better equipped to network to build your personal, peer and professional networks. I particularly like this book written by a female lawyer: Book review – Great networking by Alisa Grafton (kimtasso.com)

Fear of failure in presentations

Glossophobia is a fear of public speaking – and research suggests that almost two thirds of the population fear public speaking. And while we may fear a hostile audience that wants us to fail, usually our colleagues and clients WANT us to do well. They understand that it is challenging to present to others.

Developing presentation skills, thorough preparation and practising (perhaps with a “safe” audience) will reduce your nervousness about presentations.

Resources to help you prepare and present:

Conflict and fear of failure

Humans are wired to be social. And conflict poses a potential risk to our social networks, relationships and communities. It also poses a risk to our self-esteem if we fear we may be criticised or castigated.

But conflict is inevitable.

Learning how to manage our feelings and emotions when faced with conflict is an important life skill (emotional regulation and emotional intelligence), Emotional Regulation – A key element of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) (kimtasso.com)

We can learn how to communicate in ways that do not trigger strong emotions in others leadership conversation skills: SCARF model of neuroscience (kimtasso.com)

Once we are confident we can manage emotions well, we build our communication skills so that we convey our views and thoughts calmly and clearly. Resolving interpersonal or intergroup conflicts is another core skill set.

Resources to help us cope with conflict:

Develop resilience to reduce your fear of failure

We can improve our ability to cope with set backs and failures by developing our resilience. We can learn to bounce back better. Building Resilience – Regulation, Reframing, Relationships (kimtasso.com)

Don’t avoid things that make you anxious

It can be tempting to avoid things that make us feel anxious or that we fear. However, if we do avoid them to reduce the short term concern we are likely to become more fearful of those things in the future.

It can be useful to deploy Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) techniques to explore our feelings and thoughts about things we fear. To examine the evidence of the likelihood of problems occurring. Or to remember how we have coped with adversity in the past.

“Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway: How to Turn Your Fear and Indecision into Confidence and Action” by Susan Jeffers is a classic self-help book on this topic.

The relationship between organisational culture and fear of failure

There is much we can do to improve our confidence and reduce our fear of failure. Yet we recognised that some organisations have a culture that increases our fear of failure. For example, if an organisation doesn’t cultivate psychological safety and apportions blame when things don’t go well.

Such toxic cultures – where the focus is on blame rather than experimenting, trying and learning – will reduce the confidence of employees. Some professional firms have cultures where there is incredible pressure to perform and an aversion to failure. For example, the sometimes harmful cultures of law firms is described well in this (US) book Book review: The Thriving Lawyer by Traci Cipriano (resilience) (kimtasso.com)

Understanding our fear of failure

We talked about Imposter Syndrome at the session. This article provides one approach to overcome Imposter Syndrome. https://www.myndlift.com/post/overcoming-imposter-syndrome-and-self-doubt. Key points:

Clarify
1. understand your origin story and find the root causes
2. Know your triggers – explore the situations which increase your Imposter Syndrome feelings
3. Write an expressive letter – address the person/people you feel responsible for your feelings
Choose
1. Speak your truth
2. Recognise your strengths
3. Silence automatic negative thoughts
4. Combat perfectionism
Create
1. Experiment with new roles
2. Establish your dream team

We also talked about the need for self-compassion – being kind to ourselves. Most of us are forgiving and supportive to those around us, and we need to extend those feelings to ourselves.

Another helpful resource is: 10 Signs That You Might Have Fear of Failure | Psychology Today United Kingdom

A fear of failure is essentially a fear of shame. Shame is a psychologically toxic emotion because instead of feeling bad about our actions (guilt) or our efforts (regret), shame makes us feel bad about who we are.

People unconsciously sabotage themselves when their motivation to avoid failure exceeds their motivation to succeed. Bringing your fear of failure to the surface can help prevent it from being expressed unconsciously. Own the fear and focus on aspects in your control.

How to Overcome Fear of Failure: Your Ultimate Guide (positivepsychology.com)

Very few of us know how to fail well. Intellectually, we may know that we need a growth mindset in order to develop, and yet failure remains an experience that is often associated with shame and embarrassment. Our self-image suffers. We may feel worthless, and we may harshly castigate ourselves for our failure.

If we fail publicly, our failure is visible to others, we may also fear other people’s judgment and that our failure may have wider social repercussions. Extreme fear of failure is called atychiphobia, and it severely affects the ability of sufferers to function well in daily life.

There are many common symptoms of fear of failure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, psychologists have established that fear of failure is strongly correlated with perfectionism (Conroy et al., 2007). They identified five core beliefs about the consequence of failure, all of which are associated with the threat of appraisal and fear:

Fear of experiencing shame and embarrassment
Fear of devaluing one’s self-estimate
Fear of having an uncertain future
Fear of important others losing interest
Fear of upsetting important others

Anxieties that are associated with fear of failure usually revolve around fear of punishment; judgment; adverse impact on our careers, status, and reputation; and fear of losing or disappointing important others.

Perfectionists often equate perfect performance with self-worth, whereas they see failure as a sign of being worthless (Tangney, 2002). Cultivate what Carol Dweck (2017) has called a growth mindset, an openness to learning from failure in the service of overall development.

Start by gently building your failure muscle in a safe space. Try to learn a new skill or hobby — a sport, cooking, dancing, drawing, playing an instrument — and be kind to yourself in the learning process.

Recall gritty successful people who failed a hundred, or maybe even a thousand times, before they got somewhere with their attempts.

Start by redefining what failure means to you. If you define failure as the discrepancy between what you hope to achieve (such as getting a job offer) and what you might achieve (learning from the experience), you can focus on what you learned, which helps you recalibrate for future challenges.

It’s also important to set approach goals instead of avoidance goals: focus on what you want to achieve rather than what you want to avoid.

Creating a “fear list” can also help. This is a list of what may not happen as a result of your fear — the cost of inaction.

And finally, focus on learning. The chips aren’t always going to fall where you want them to — but if you expect that reality going into an event, you can be prepared to wring the most value out of whatever outcome.

How to Overcome Your Fear of Failure (hbr.org)

Redefine failure
Set approach goals (not avoidance goals)
Create a fear list
Focus on learning

How to Conquer Fear of Failure | Psychology Today United Kingdom

Redefine failure as discrepancy
Distinguish between real and imagined threats
Create promotion rather than prevention goals
Expect a good outcome but do not become attached to it
You are strong and you can prevail

Brene Brown’s famous statement Brene Brown: If You’re Brave Enough You’re Going to Fail (youtube.com). And also Brené Brown Says ‘Get Back Up When Your Plans Fail’ (forbes.com)

Remember that if your anxiety, stress, fear of failure or low mood starts to limit your personal and professional life speak you should speak to your line manager and HR team. Or seek professional help Tasso Talking Therapy. This article describes how therapy can help with Imposter Syndrome Overcoming imposter syndrome: How therapy can help – Counselling Directory (counselling-directory.org.uk)

Delegate poll results

Delegates included trainees and newly qualified solicitors, PA and secretaries

Delegate aims:

Overcome fear of being wrong
Reduce worry of saying the wrong thing
Be more confident talking to the (older, male) Board members
Feel less lonely when there’s no back up
Feel better about presenting
Adjust to promotion
Increase confidence when managing client meetings
Reduce my self-doubt
Recover from loss of assistant
Build relationships over the phone, email and virtual meetings
Reduce anxiety being surrounded by high-fliers

Delegate takeaways

Cognitive biases (e.g. The Dunning-Kruger Effect)
The importance of body language (non-verbal communication)
Breathing exercises to remain calm
Reframing negative thoughts into positives
Not feeling alone (knowing there are others that feel the same)
What you wear
Open body language
Ask more questions
Speak slower
To not be a drain in conversations/meetings
I need to be a radiator for myself not only others

Avoid multitasking! Multitasking: Switching costs (apa.org)

Confidence levels

	At the start of session?	How would you like to feel at work?	At the end of the session?
1
2
3
4	11%
5	22%		10%
6	44%		20%
7	22%		40%
8			20%
9		67%	10%
10		33%

How often do you experience Imposter Syndrome?

50% Occasionally
50% Often

Which is the situation where you most lack confidence?

30% Day-to-day role within the team
0% Learning new things
40% Presentations/public speaking
0% Telephone calls
0% Actual or virtual meetings
0% Social/conversations
30% Conflict situations

Do you avoid things that make you feel nervous?

100% Sometimes

(I mentioned that you should not avoid the things that make you nervous. As this will usually increase your anxiety about it and make you feel more nervous)

Are you mostly:

56% An optimist
44% A pessimist

How resilient do you think you are? Improve your resilience – tools to help you cope in difficult times (kimtasso.com)

0% Very low
30% Low
60% Average
10% High
0% Very high

What impact do you think clothes have on how confident you appear? (1=low, 10=high)

3 10%
4
5 10%
6
7 20%
8 40%
9 10%
10 10%

Where does most of your personal power come from? How do you make a personal impact – Make a difference (kimtasso.com)

29% Presence
14% Authority
57% Impact

Do you think you are: Assertiveness skills – getting what you want and saying “No” (kimtasso.com)

25% Assertive
75% Passive
0% Passive-Aggressive
0% Aggressive

I think my boundaries are:

80% Porous
20% Healthy
0% Rigid

Situations where we fear failure

Fear of failure when learning new things

Fear of failure in conversations

Fear of failure in networking

Fear of failure in presentations

Conflict and fear of failure

Develop resilience to reduce your fear of failure

Don’t avoid things that make you anxious

The relationship between organisational culture and fear of failure

Understanding our fear of failure

Delegate poll results

Related posts on confidence

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Confidence to overcome a fear of failure

Situations where we fear failure

Fear of failure when learning new things

Fear of failure in conversations

Fear of failure in networking

Fear of failure in presentations

Conflict and fear of failure

Develop resilience to reduce your fear of failure

Don’t avoid things that make you anxious

The relationship between organisational culture and fear of failure

Understanding our fear of failure

Delegate poll results

Related posts on confidence

Tags

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