How to deal with fear of failure?

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answer by pjeby · 2023-08-02T21:47:37.574Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

One of the reasons your question is challenging is that "fear of failure" is a phrase our brains use to stop thinking about the horrible thing they don't want to think about. "Failure" is an abstract label, but the specific thing you fear isn't the literal failure to accomplish your goal. It's some concrete circumstance the situation will resemble, along with some defined meaning of the failure.

This is easier to see if you consider how many things you do every day that involve failure to accomplish a goal and yet do not provoke the same kind of emotion. Lots of things are "no big deal" and thus no big deal to fail at.

Things that are a "big deal" are a big deal because of some meaning we assign to them, either positively or negatively.

Mostly negatively.

More specifically: negatively, masquerading as positively. The "tell" for this is when your goals are suspiciously abstract or unclear. It's a strong sign that the real motivation for the goals is signaling, specifically signaling that you aren't something.

These days I call it GUPI Syndrome, for "Guilty Until Proven Innocent". Common patterns I see in my practice:

• Businessperson is obsessed with "taking their business to the next level" without any specific goals in mind... because what they really want is their family to finally acknowledge they're capable of taking care of themselves and worthy of respect. (aka "Not a Disappointment")
• Guy is obsessed with learning PUA in order to talk to women... not because he wants to talk to any women in particular, but because he believes being uncomfortable talking to women means he's "less of a man" than the other guys he grew up with
• Entrepreneur is obsessed with improving their productivity, getting more done and building habits and whatever productivity buzzword is of the day. Turns out, their family doesn't believe a person is good unless they are busy to the point of being stressed, so any time the entrepreneur starts improving their productivity enough to have free time, they start backsliding until they reach an appropriate level of stress.
• Gifted kid grows up knowing they're meant to change the world, quickly discovers that they should have been more specific. Upset they're not "reaching their potential", flounders between different goals but finds themselves unable to commit to anything for long. Complains of lack of motivation. Usually has issues with family not believing in their dreams or taking them seriously, feels need to do something big to justify their existence to the universe, if not themselves and their family.

So quite often, the phrase "fear of failure" actually unpacks to "fear I will fail at my lifelong mission to prove I'm not {lazy, a loser, incompetent, stupid, not a man, irresponsible, etc...}".

And this can't be addressed by advice that's aimed at motivation or discipline or what-have-you, because the underlying emotional goal will never be satisfied. Ever.

You can never win enough to "prove" you're not a loser.

You can't prove a negative, and that is fundamentally what this syndrome is about: proving you're not something that you're afraid other people may see you as.

(To be clear here, this is the generic "you" of anyone who is experiencing this, which I'm not saying is "you", the author of this question!)

Anyway, the solution to this problem is to stop trying to prove you're not whatever bad thing you fear you already are (or that people do/might believe you are). This may involve several sub-steps such as:

• Stop looking down on people who match the label you fear (e.g. stop thinking of people as irresponsible or lazy or whatever), or stop believing it's a morally bad thing that justifies treating another human badly. (Because if you hate/fear/pity other people being it, you will also hate/fear/pity yourself.)
• Realize that the interactions you learned this idea from were things done and said by other people, who have sole responsibility for their own actions, which you didn't control. That their assessment of your character was not necessarily correct, or even if it was, it didn't entitle them to treat you in the way that they did. (And even if it did, it would not require you to go along quietly with it, certainly not if this happened years ago and those people aren't even around!)
• Resolve the feelings of shame or guilt from not having anyone on your side when your family or whoever called you the things you did. Get support to realize, deep down, that people exist who would've stood up for you if they could, called out the insinuations, defended you, encouraged you, etc.

Is this a lot? Yes it is. But the payoff is that once you're no longer trying to prove a negative to your emotional brain, you have a lot more mental energy available to spend on goals that no longer seem like such a "big deal", and whose path to achievement feels much clearer.

(Also, it's hard to overstate how big a deal it is to not be feeling every day like someone is going to uncover your horrible secrets or everyone will see you fall on your face, or whatever the thing is that's going on.)

answer by melo · 2023-07-16T03:26:36.135Z · LW(p) · GW(p)