How I lost my fear of failure.
Failure is NOT a bad thing.
This however is a lie that we sub-consciously tell ourselves when we pursue our goals in life. We sometimes act as if we are entitled to have success in life all the time.
However, if we look at our lives carefully, you will find that we are destined to experience failures right from the very beginning of our lives. When we are babies, we are taught to walk and talk. When we first try to walk, we would normally just crawl on all fours with our arms and legs in order to move about as we are not able to keep our balance on our two feet.
When we are growing up and we fail a school exam or we do not do a certain job in the way that our parents or teacher would like us to do it, we are shamed, told off and occasionally even disgraced for our short-comings. This gives us the internal signal that we are "failures" in some way. However, sometimes our failings actually have nothing to do with us. We might have forgotten or mis- understood an instruction or maybe we simply do not have th right "mental toolkit" to succeed in a certain task of job.
One way of another we are constantly told that failure is bad and wrong and that we should avoid failure and be adverse to it all costs; and yet failure as we are about the discover, is actually the most important and valuable part of out road to success in anything that way try to achieve in life.
One thing that I have learnt through my journey is that you can actually programme the way you think about life. I first learnt this from a book called "What to say when you talk to yourself" by Shad Helmstetter. This small book taught me how powerful affirmations and inner mental messages can be. Positive self-talk can be a very powerful tool on you path to success. For example, I convinced myself for a long time that I was bad a blitz (speed) chess because I was not a naturally fast player. When I play chess, I usually like to take my time and double-check certain move before I played them. However, I started to encourage myself by saying "I AM a good blitz player" This helped my lose my fear of failure and before you know it, guess what! I actually won an online blitz tournament. Hence, my life has proven that this method really works. There is a common expression that comes from successful people. "Fake it till you make it!" Sometimes the best way to be successful is to pretend that you already are!
While reading the book "Forgiveness is power" by William Fergus Martin I realised the importance of forgiving oneself when falling short of our goals. Many of us are often harsh on ourselves when we are not able to achieve what we wanted to do. Many of us blame ourselves for our lack of achievement in a certain task but we have to remember that there are usually more factors in achieving a certain goal in life than we realise. These are many external factors like:
As explained above, failure is not a bad thing. In fact in order to succeed, we actually have to accept that we are initially going to have our failures first. What we have to realise above all things is that failure is not the opposite of success, failure is part of success. We have to look at our short comings as opportunities to learn valuable lessons instead of seeing problems and losses. If we look at all challenges this way, then we can attempt any task or challenge and embrace the journey that it leads to the full. During my chess career, I went through a lot of failures and difficulties. I even wanted to quit at times, but I decided to keep going and finding different ways of doing things and eventually, I got my rewards for my efforts. Any path to glory will have it's bitter moments but sometimes you just have to be patient for success to come. Eventually, you will get there in the end.
When we are growing up and we fail a school exam or we do not do a certain job in the way that our parents or teacher would like us to do it, we are shamed, told off and occasionally even disgraced for our short-comings. This gives us the internal signal that we are "failures" in some way. However, sometimes our failings actually have nothing to do with us. We might have forgotten or mis- understood an instruction or maybe we simply do not have th right "mental toolkit" to succeed in a certain task of job.
One way of another we are constantly told that failure is bad and wrong and that we should avoid failure and be adverse to it all costs; and yet failure as we are about the discover, is actually the most important and valuable part of out road to success in anything that way try to achieve in life.
Talk you way to success
One thing that I have learnt through my journey is that you can actually programme the way you think about life. I first learnt this from a book called "What to say when you talk to yourself" by Shad Helmstetter. This small book taught me how powerful affirmations and inner mental messages can be. Positive self-talk can be a very powerful tool on you path to success. For example, I convinced myself for a long time that I was bad a blitz (speed) chess because I was not a naturally fast player. When I play chess, I usually like to take my time and double-check certain move before I played them. However, I started to encourage myself by saying "I AM a good blitz player" This helped my lose my fear of failure and before you know it, guess what! I actually won an online blitz tournament. Hence, my life has proven that this method really works. There is a common expression that comes from successful people. "Fake it till you make it!" Sometimes the best way to be successful is to pretend that you already are!
Self Forgiveness
- Atmosphere
- Social Settings
- General Environment
- Education
- Location
- Upbringing
These are only a small amount of external factors that may prevent us from succeeding. As we can see, it is not always our fault when we fall short of our goals in life. Many of us have barriers that we may not even be aware of.
Self Forgiveness is about realising that sometimes our ability to achieve a certain goal in life is simply our our hands. When you fall short of your goals, remember to tell yourself that you did your best in the given situation and your results cannot always be helped.
Failure LEADS TO success!
Summary
The realisation that I have described above has given me a sense of freedom and joy. It has given me the desire to try new challenges in life and enhanced my motivation to improve on the challenges that I am already taking. I can now pursue dreams and goals without ever worrying about what is commonly called "failure". I look forward to new challenges (and continuation of old ones) that come my way in the future.
Good luck with yours!
Richard Davis
