Overcoming the Fear of Failure

Learning to ask for the right feedback makes all the difference

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme. This month we’re exploring fear.

This Week at a Glance:

This week, we take a look at something that plagues all of us: a fear of failure. Failure is itself one of the things that holds us back the most in life. But when we can properly approach failure, then it is no longer as scary as we once thought.

By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:

🍭 How to overcome your fear of failure;
🍬 What type of feedback you will want to be getting from people;
🍫 The critical question you should be asking for when asking for feedback.

Failure is often equated with pain. 

We naturally try to avert ourselves away from it and lean into enjoyment as much as we can. 

But we too often learn more from pain and failure than we do success and accomplishment. Think about the last time you accomplished something, more often than not, your gut reaction was to look at what went wrong, not where and how you succeeded.

But this is a two fold problem: on one hand, we discount the effort and ability we applied to the areas we did not succeed in, and secondly, we tend to not provide enough attention to the areas we did succeed in.

This is often due to the fact that the world tells us that it is success that we need. The problem is, without failure, there is no success.

“You can't be ready for anything if you haven't trained for everything,” writes the psychologist Adam Grant.

We cannot reach our potential without putting ourselves outside our comfort zone. Outside of our comfort zone means becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable, leaning into unfamiliarity.

By doing so, it means our chances of failure go up. But it also means our likelihood of learning and succeeding also rise, if we approach the scenario correctly.

When speaking to Andrew Huberman on the Huberman Labs podcast, Grant references a meta-analysis done on feedback from the last hundred years and explains exactly what type of feedback we should be looking for.

“What drives the utility of feedback is not whether it is positive or negative. It is whether it focuses on the task or the self.”

This is critical because it means we should be looking for feedback from others that will be honest but still useful.

Feedback brings critics and cheerleaders, but we want a coach who “helps us be a better version of ourselves,” Grant says.

If we’re looking to be better, we want people who will assist us by not just telling us we did good but also not someone who tells us we did horrible. Instead, we need someone who can help us strategically see areas we did well in and areas that still need improvement.

When we have someone like this, who acts like a coach, we can have better focus on the areas we need to apply our attention to.

There are four general areas of feedback:

• Things are negative (we tend to become defensive and ruminate on this)

• Things are great (we can easily become complacent with this feedback and miss areas that need improving)

• Areas that were liked (you’ll want to keep doing what you’re doing here)

• Areas that weren’t liked (you’ll need to put some attention here and see why it isn’t working)

The last two feedbacks are the kind that help build us and over time diminish our fear of failure.

When we can reframe failure from a loss and instead look at it as reps for improvement (finding what we’re doing right and continuing that, while also looking at what’s not working and getting coaching on that) then we find ourselves on a continuous path of improvement.

It is through this type of feedback, the coaching style feedback, that we improve the quickest because it helps isolate what’s working and what’s not so we can properly apply our time in the right areas.

If you can ask someone “what’s one thing I can do better next time?” they’re more inclined to give you actionable feedback rather than an overall assessment of good or bad and it is through this actionable feedback that we get better and overcome our fear of failure.

When we’re kids, we never think of failure, we always are just trying new things and working to have fun and accomplish them. But as we get older we’re told failure is bad. But it is in fact through failure that we most learn, that we turn weaknesses into strength, and we grow as individuals. By reframing the failure as opportunities to learn, we’re better equipped to grow and lose our fear of failing.

3-Bullet Summary:

• Failure is a natural part of life. Without properly experiencing failure, we never truly learn.

• Proper feedback is necessary in overcoming failure because it allows us to understand what is working and what isn’t.

• When looking for feedback from others, don’t ask generic questions like “how did it go?”, rather, try and get the individual to act like a coach by asking them to pick out an area they think worked well or one they didn’t think worked.

Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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