Hello, and welcome to a new episode of the Quiet Leaders Club podcast!
Today, let’s discuss why your fear of failure is probably the reason why you haven’t achieved what you consider to be success yet.
Transcript below if you prefer to read,
Your fear of failure is stopping you from achieving success.
Your reluctance to take a risk is the reason why you haven’t seen the success you want yet.
Your absolute refusal to put yourself in a situation where you receive a rejection that hurts is holding you back from all the amazing things that you’re capable of achieving.
Something I’ve found while studying the careers of quiet people is that we were often super successful students. You know, high grades at school, never turned in homework late, perfectionistic tendencies.
And then you get into the working world, and you realise that none of it matters. Because the working world isn’t about being a good girl or boy and always handing your work in on time. It’s about being visible and being liked (or maybe not liked but respected) and being able to share ideas.
That is why we have so many annoying loud-mouthed managers that aren’t actually that good at their jobs in the world - they’re seen and they’re not afraid to suggest things.
Because even if their ideas aren’t good, they’re better than any idea that never sees the light of day because their owner is too worried about being rejected to put it out there.
Or maybe you’ve failed before. Maybe you’ve received a rejection that was so crushing at the time that you vowed never to put yourself in that position again.
But how silly does it sound to say that you’ll never take a risk that could move you forward because you didn’t get into your first-choice uni when you were seventeen?
When you put it like that, it sounds very silly indeed.
What do we really fear about rejection?
There’s a Ted Talk by Jia Jiang called what I learned from 100 days of rejection. It has 6.2 million views at the time of recording this, so you might have seen it and have probably heard it referenced before.
At the start of the talk, Jia tells a story about how when he was six, his teacher brought in a box of gifts and everyone in the class had to say something nice about another student and they got a gift. And it got down to the last three students, Jia being one of them, and they didn’t get any compliments. And decades later, when he was thirty and had started his own company, the memory of this early rejection still held him back.
So he started a challenge where he had to get rejected by someone every single day for 100 days. A lot of the challenges were silly and he would obviously be told no, like asking someone for money and asking for free food. But as the challenge went on, he found that things like asking the person rejecting him why might turn a “no” into a “yes”. He found that he connected with other people from this challenge.
But the most important lesson from the challenge, for me anyway, is that nothing horrible happened when he was rejected; when he failed. No one died. No one yelled at him. The no was just a no.
It didn’t mean anything about Jia.
Because what are we actually afraid of, when we fear failure? For most of us, failure isn’t something we can’t recover from. It simply hurts, or sets us back a little.
And you know what? It’s valid not to want to experience pain or setbacks. But if you want to achieve great things, if you want to live a life that makes you feel fulfilled, you almost certainly will experience them at some point, whether it’s through work or relationships or something else.
Why we need to take risks
And as Jia found in his experiment, the more you get rejected, the more you fail, the easier it gets.
When we take risks and fail, we can choose to pick ourselves back up and try again. We learn what we can do better next time. We grow, if we allow ourselves to stay open to the opportunity risks bring.
When we take risks and succeed, our confidence grows.
One of my favourite people on Instagram is the artist Sophie Tea. You might know her for her nude paintings, her signature use of pink and more recently, her charity shop Friday videos where she buys something from a charity shop, paints it and gives it back to the charity shop to resell.
This is not someone who you would expect faces much rejection, right?
I recently listened to Sophie being interviewed on a podcast and she spoke about how she was rejected from art galleries, she was rejected from the uni she wanted to go to, she was making art for five years before she saw huge success.
Five years! I feel like giving up on things if I don’t think they’ve been “successful enough” after six months.
In fact, almost every success story she told on this podcast started with some form of failure or rejection.
But Sophie used every failure as an opportunity to build something that paved the way for others like her. She opened a welcoming gallery that encourages people to hang out and spend time with the art, a refreshing change from the snooty, cold galleries that want you to buy something or get out.
So you see, failure can be good. It can be repurposed. It can make you realise that you actually didn’t want the thing you thought you did or it can solidify your belief in it.
The thing that keeps you small is avoiding failure at all costs. To achieve great things, you need to be able to take risks, to ask for things that might receive a “no” in response.
And actually, stopping yourself from taking risks due to your fear of failure is what actually makes you feel like a failure.
The more you take (strategic, thoughtful) risks, the more your confidence increases. You realise that failure isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Why successful people are risk takers
One thing all successful people have in common is resilience.
How boring would it be if every success story was simply that the person in question tried something and it worked?
The truth is, the stories we love to hear usually involve success despite adversity.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that great success can only come from pain, but I do believe that the people who change the world did so for a reason full of meaning.
You may not think of yourself as someone who wants to change the world, but I’d bet that if you clicked play on this episode, you at the very least want to change your world.
Why do successful people take risks? Because they know that failure doesn’t say anything about them as a person. That gives them the freedom to take the risks that pay off.
In some ways, doing well at school clips our wings. When we’re consistently praised for getting top marks and told how clever we are from a very young age, it can muddy how we think of our value as a person. We develop this debilitating fear of failure because we value a passing grade too highly. You might even find that it’s difficult to learn new things when you aren’t good at them straight away because it makes you feel like a failure.
Great leaders know that they will fail, and that it doesn’t mean anything about them as a person. They know that failing is a really effective way of learning, and that keeps them going. They believe that sooner or later, all the risks and failures will pay off.
Overcoming your fear of failure/rejection
But how do you get over a fear of failure?
Do you, too, need to subject yourself to 100 days of rejection? I don’t think so.
I think it’s a case, as is so often with building confidence and resilience, of starting small and building up.
Maybe you have a lot of ideas for your workplace that you’ve never raised for fear of being told that your ideas are stupid. Share one of your ideas with your manager. They might say no, but they absolutely won’t tell you that you’re stupid. Worst case scenario is being told no and realising that it’s not that bad, best case scenario is having your idea approved and boosting your profile at work.
Perhaps you want to start building a personal brand online, but you’re worried about what your friends or your auntie or your mum’s next door neighbour’s goddaughter might say. Maybe they’ll make fun of you behind your back and you’ll never know about it! So why not assume the best?
Make that first post. See what happens. Probably nothing. Maybe some people judge it, maybe they don’t. But they’re unlikely to say anything to you anyway, and they probably don’t have any sway on your career either, so who cares?
Keep doing it, and over time, people who can impact your career might see what you’ve built. Stay small and they will probably never see or hear your name.
It’s up to you.
These are small, fairly inconsequential things, and that’s why I’m suggesting them. Start with the little things where failing might sting a little, but isn’t going to make you cry yourself to sleep every night for a week.
When you succeed, your confidence grows. When you fail, you learn and get better (and your confidence still grows, because you got rejected and no one died).
Little by little, you’ll be able to take more risks, better planned risks, and this will lead you to success.
So remember, fear of failure keeps you small. Opening up to risk opens you up to endless opportunities.
The choice is yours.
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