My Reality Check Bounced! - Jason Ryan Dorsey [67]
How does your mind make the risk of failure so terrifying that you will give up pursuing your most inspiring dreams? You make failure personal.
Fear in Action
Maurine knows how scary it feels to make failure personal. In her second semester at nursing school, she got behind and wasn’t able to catch up. She failed one class and was so afraid she might not have what it takes to be a nurse, that she took off the next semester and seriously considered not going back. A friend finally convinced her that all she needed to succeed was to take fewer classes each semester, which is what she eventually did. Now she’s a nurse and she loves it. However, if Maurine’s friend had not helped her face her fear of failure, she might have given up her lifelong dream—all because she failed one class!
Maurine’s mistake was that she made her failure personal. She let one failed class mean that she wasn’t cut out for her dream. Making failure personal adds emotion to your setbacks, which crushes your confidence, creativity, and self-esteem. One-time setbacks can grow into lifelong stumbling blocks. Short-term missteps become unrecoverable mistakes. When you make failure personal you take the wind out of your sails and can become so paralyzed with fear that you can’t chart a new course.
To keep from making failure personal, you have to separate who you are from what you do. When you separate who you are from what you do, you create room to see all your failures—and you are likely to have many—as temporary. This approach helps you learn from them and move on, even if you have to stop and regroup. By separating who you are from what you do, you can persist through the most trying failure because you see failure for what it is: a test of your commitment to living your Future Picture.
Here are some examples of how you can separate yourself from failure:
• If you flunk out of college, you’re not a failure, your approach to college was. Figure out what you can do differently next time and reenroll.
• If you start a business and it goes bankrupt, you’re not a failure, your business model was. Research how to improve your business model so your next venture is a home run.
• If you have a relationship and it falls apart, you’re not a failure, the relationship was. Identify what went wrong and work on it so during your next go-round you both get what you want.
As frustrating as failure can feel, it doesn’t signify that you’re worthless, a bad person, or that your ideas are without merit. Failure is simply a by-product of progress. At worst, failure is an intensely educational experience that teaches you a valuable lesson. At best, failure is the perfect setup for finding new solutions to old problems so you get what you want quicker.
In fact, many of the greatest inventions, social advancements, and civil rights, came from people who failed repeatedly—and often in public! They didn’t give up and neither should you.
Let me say it this way: if you’re not failing, you’re not pushing yourself to your limit. You have further to go to find out what you are truly made of and prove to yourself what you are capable of achieving.
TO CONQUER FEAR OF FAILURE
1. See yourself as an underdog. Underdogs never quit, no matter how intense the peer pressure, physical obstacle, or emotional stress. Think of the 2004 Red Sox. If they had quit when it looked hopeless, Boston might have had to wait another eighty-six years for a World Series victory.
2. Don’t hide from who you are. Write down every reason you can think of that proves why you can, should, and will succeed. Ask friends and family for their thoughts, too. Just as Stephen did, get clear that success is who you are!
3. Know that baby steps will eventually complete a marathon. Each day, take one step forward that contradicts your fear of failure. For example, if you fear meeting new people, make it a point to introduce yourself to one stranger every day. Keep track of your baby steps toward freedom so you see you’re moving forward.
4. When the wind gets knocked out of you,