Do you find that you are constantly afraid of failing at things? Maybe you hold off on certain goals, as you are too scared about failing? This is a pretty common fear and is known as Atychiphobia.
A lot of people can develop a fear of failure, and this can sometimes stop them from achieving goals in life.
Atychiphobia can make you miss out on certain opportunities, which may make you feel upset or stressed. Therefore, it would be very beneficial for you to learn how to overcome it. Firstly, let’s take a look at what causes Atychiphobia…
People can develop a fear of failure (also known as Atychiphobia) due to many different reasons. Another thing to remember is that we all have different definitions of failure, as we are not all the same, and will have different examples of what failure means.
Some people may just get a bit worried about messing up in certain situations and looking like a failure, whereas others will completely stop what they are doing, or not participate in certain things due to a phobia of failing (Atychiphobia).
Here are some examples of different causes of Atychiphobia:
Now that you know what some of the causes of Atychiphobia may be, here are some ways to overcome a fear of failure.
Different things will work for different people, so try and find what works best for you.
1. Reframe FailureOne of the best things you can do is to try and reframe your way of thinking about failure. Instead of seeing failure as a negative thing, try to look at it as a positive.
Failure can actually be a learning experience for you!
Try to remember that most people don’t succeed straight away, there will be mistakes and failures along the way.
These experiences can help you to learn and improve until you do succeed.
Being able to change your view on failure could really help you to not be so scared of experiencing it and instead, helping you learn how to be optimistic and to learn from your mistakes.
Asking yourself questions can be a great way to become more aware of how you are feeling and why you feel that way. If you make a mistake, and you start to doubt yourself, take a minute to stop and ask yourself some questions.
These could be questions such as:
This will make you dive deeper into how you are feeling, and work on improving things you need to improve on.
This can really help you when you are facing failures as you are changing your negative mindset and hopefully learning more about yourself too.
Related article: 10 Thought-Provoking Questions To Ask Yourself Today
A big part of why we are scared of failing can be due to our lack of confidence, or strong desire for perfection. You should always try and treat yourself as you would treat a friend; as kindly as you can.
Treat yourself with sympathy and understand why you are feeling a certain way. Once you are able to analyze and find out why you feel a certain way, you can work on changing the way you feel by learning how to be kind to yourself.
This can help you in the future, as you will know what you need to do to control your emotions if you make any mistakes.
Learning from your past is also a great way to change your mindset and face your fears once again. Taking notes and writing down how you feel, what happened and why can really help you to face any failure when it comes to the fear of the future.
This can help you as you are able to analyze in detail, things that happened in the past to trigger this feeling and how you overcame it. By writing all of this down you can see what does and doesn’t work for you, including any challenges you faced and how you faced them.
Try to analyze all of the outcomes if you are doubting yourself in a certain situation. This can sometimes help you put things into perspective, and see that failing is not the worst thing that can happen.
Accepting and realizing that you may fail, (and that it is OK), can be a very effective way of improving your mindset. Being able to analyze the outcomes will keep you prepared for what might happen, and can help you to deal with the emotions you might also face from it.
6. Expose Yourself To FailureTry and start exposing yourself to failure. This means trying something new that you are unskilled in, and may make mistakes too. This can show you that mistakes aren’t as scary as they may seem to you right now.
This should hopefully help you to recognize that you need to fail in order to learn and improve yourself and your skill. For example, if you learn how to play the piano, you may find that for the first few weeks you make mistakes when trying to learn a song, but each time you try again you get better until you can play the whole song beautifully.
This can really help you understand that failures can be a positive thing – this also applies to overcoming the fear of rejection.
Visualization can be a very powerful tool, and it can also help you to face your fears in the future as well. Being able to visualize yourself facing your failure and growing stronger from it, and accepting it can be a great tool to use, along with positive thinking.
Positive thinking is great, but using that alone may not be helpful. Being positive whilst also visualizing yourself happily overcoming any obstacles that you could face can really help you to feel much better when you are faced with your next challenge.
Facing your fear of failure could seem like a very big challenge right now. If you need some extra help, here is a free ebook that you can get access to with tips to help. Try them out and see what work best for you.
