Some time ago I had a conversation with Manon, owner of a super successful healthy pizza company. She had a goal she still wanted to achieve, but felt that she had a fear of failure, that this fear was stopping her from growing.
Fear of failure therapy can be useful for common fear of failure, such as before exams, but also if you suffer from fear of failure while you are already successful, but still want to grow further.
Something stopping you from growing
Fear of failure is something that stops you from growing. If you are successful and you find that you are no longer growing, something inside yourself may be holding you back. You feel like there is more in it, but for some reason it just isn't happening. This could just be fear of failure.
Maybe you still have a limit you're afraid you won't reach. Rather than be disappointed, you suddenly find yourself procrastinating completely against your normal nature.
Failure for your team
The feeling of fear of failure when you are successful can feel very strange. After all, you have never suffered from fear of failure. This may be because you now feel responsible not only for yourself, but for your entire team. Surely it is a very different feeling when you have only yourself with a failure action than when several people suffer from it.
As an executive, whether through your own business or because you hold a managerial position, you want to do well for your team.
Remember then, that your team has also chosen you and are aware of the risks you take and that that can go wrong. Ultimately, success in their lives is also their own responsibility and not yours.
This fear of disappointing the team is also seen in athletes who suffer from fear of failure[1].
With expectations, it gets harder
Once you become successful, people often start expecting success from you. Suddenly you have people looking over your shoulder, and you probably remember when a test seemed just a little more difficult when the teacher was standing next to your table.
You can get that feeling again if you are already successful and want to move on to your next goal. Only then, much more depends on it than just the good grade.
With those expectations, fear of failure can also be the fear of suddenly feeling ashamed because you do not meet those expectations, this is also something that people with perfectionism can suffer from[2].
Or do you just find it scary when it does succeed
Being a successful person can also be something other than fear of failure, such as the fear that you will indeed achieve your next goal. Especially when this goal currently feels to you like getting to the final level.
You may then subconsciously feel that there is nothing (left) once you reach your goal. The fear of achieving the goal can then be mistaken for fear of failure.
Fear of failure as the reason everything succeeds
What's also possible is that you are successful precisely because you have fear of failure. Instead of staying in bed, you are so afraid of failure that you do something about it.
Instead, you try your hardest to make everything work, but this is still incredibly stressful and not necessarily something that makes you happy.
Fear of failure therapy if you are already successful
As can be read, fear of failure in successful people can be linked to more than just your personal life, such as the lives of your team members, expectations of other people and even the feeling that there is no next level.
If you then go for fear of failure therapy, you can find out why you are afraid of achieving your next goal or of failing. Is it really the fear that you won't succeed anyway and that people who now look up to you will suddenly disappear? Or is it the fear that after achieving that goal you will fall into some kind of black hole?
A bit like people who can retire early to find out they actually like their work and find nothing to do, nothing to do.
Help to see things from a different angle
Depending on your beliefs about your success, the people you work with and why you are afraid to reach a goal or that you wonder if you can achieve it, a therapist, such as a hypnotherapist, can use a particular technique to help you.
Initially, each therapist will start the conversation with you to find out how you see the world and how you think you should function in that world. In the first part of the blog, we will discuss beliefs that successful people may have.
The therapist can use that input to help you look at your problem in a different way, for example. Such as by asking yourself who is actually responsible for your team's success, you or your team itself?
Sometimes this alone can be enough, but sometimes not.
Visualization against fear of failure
So can using certain feelings if you want to take a different approach to something. With guided visualizations, for example, you can make the feeling of fear of failure disappear. How this is done with such a visualization is different for everyone. Generally, making some kind of shape and doing something with it in your mind is enough to remove anxiety.
But it can also be deeper than that.
Addressing beliefs that cause fear of failure
You may also suffer from beliefs that create fear of failure. For example, people may think that if they don't perform, no one loves them. That makes not performing an existential problem. A problem to sustain your social life with, no wonder you then suffer from fear of failure.
One way to deal with this is with regression. With regression, you go back to the first moment when you felt the fear you are feeling now. Or when the belief arose that now causes fear of failure.
As you can see, with people who are already successful, it's not always obvious, which is why you may need a few reminders along the way to remove the feeling.
When your mind is on a memory, the hypnotherapist helps you interpret that memory in a different way. You then start to update and re-store it, so to speak. This creates new connections, which can make your fear of failure go away.
Interpreting can be redone in many ways. For example, you can empathize with other people present in the situation, you can add your adult self in your mind and have it intervene. A lot of things can be done.
Next, the hypnotherapist will check whether or not your fear of failure feeling is gone. This is a kind of check to see if the problem has been resolved.
The reactions when this succeeds are very nice; people often find it a magical feeling.
Suggestions to keep away fear of failure
Then - or before this technique is applied - you can also get suggestions to be more confident, that everything will work out and fear of failure is unnecessary. These suggestions are often based on your worldview and beliefs that caused fear of failure in the first place.
You can repeat these at home to properly capture the change in your brain. These can include suggestions such as:
"I am good enough the way I am."
"I get to relax."
"Everyone is responsible for themselves."
"You can always do something or do nothing."
These are just examples. You may receive other suggestions depending on your situation.
Therapy for fear of failure can do an awful lot for you. You can become more relaxed about achieving your goals after this type of therapy, or even determine that you want to pursue entirely different goals.
Hypnotherapy mainly helps you to make the mental change, to be more relaxed about the goals you want to achieve, so that you have less or no fear of failure.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works? Then come to the free online master class on hypnosis.
Or enroll directly inone of our training courses if you want to help people who suffer from fear of failure.
Sources:
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10413201003664962
[2] https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/jsep/31/5/article-p602.xml
