Fear of Failure

Fear of failure

When we started goal setting and getting some success I naively thought other people might copy us as it works. Not that I tried to convince anyone. I learnt a long time ago that even if you prove beyond reasonable doubt that something is a good thing that people will not follow you unless they are entirely convinced.

They cannot be persuaded and if you do persuade them and it goes wrong they will only come back to you and complain.

I wondered why no one I know does any proper goal setting and the only reason I can come up with is fear of failure. If they actually stop talking about things and start a plan that they write down or is visible to others they are putting their reputations on the line.

Fear of failure stops most of us doing most things. We do not want to step outside what we already know as we are comfortable with that and we can fail or succeed on our own terms.

A recently programme on television showed a group of volunteers who claimed they wanted to pay off their mortgages in two years. It seems that 85% the British population claim that their mortgage is the main reason that they are being held back. They feel if they could pay off their mortgages their lives would be better and they could succeed in all areas of their lives.

If we quote things like a mortgage it appears beyond our control. It is easier to think that we will become rich or famous by chance than doing any work. It strikes me as a get out clause. Because most of us have large mortgages we can bemoan the fact they we are losers because overwhelming reasons rather than that we have a chance of working at it by having a reasonable set of goals.

In goal setting you should have small intermediate goals which are achievable. By saying pay off your mortgage to most people that seems totally unachievable so we can justify doing nothing about it. No one would regard us a failure if we never paid off our mortgage the task is too large.

The programme took the volunteers and gave them the skills and help they needed to clear their mortgages in two years.

I only saw one do it. The rest were perfectly able to do it but through a combination of lack of purpose and time wasting they did not make it. They would keep talking through what they were doing rather than do it.

The fear of failure froze them to no action at all. It was though they could not bear to deal with success. It showed up that even with all the help in the world they cannot do it.

Maybe deep down they did not want it enough or they really believed it was not possible so did not try hard enough.

The moral is you have the skills but not the will to succeed