Medium: Becoming Free From the Fear of Failure (interview)
The Fear of Failure is one of the most common restraints that holds people back from pursuing great ideas. Imagine if we could become totally free from the fear of failure. Imagine what we could then manifest and create. In this interview series, we are talking to leaders who can share stories and insights from their experience about “Becoming Free From the Fear of Failure.” As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Gianna Biscontini.
We would like to explore and flesh out the concept of becoming free from failure. Let’s zoom in a bit. From your experience, why exactly are people so afraid of failure? Why is failure so frightening to us?
From a scientific standpoint, our environment signals to us that failure means we have done something wrong or that we aren’t good enough. This creates an aversion to anything considered to be a failure, which leads to a host of harmful behaviors like lying, faking it or fudging business numbers. We live in a success-obsessed country, thanks to social media and the prevalence of “curation culture”, and we operate in a constant state of scarcity. This has led to widespread depression and anxiety, and is even shown to contribute to suicide.
What are the downsides of being afraid of failure? How can it limit people?
Let’s examine fear more closely. Fear of failure isn’t being afraid that something won’t go well. More likely it is fear of repercussions, what others will do, think or say, or the loss of power, respect and authority you may experience as a result of things not going well. Failure may also cause fear or anxiety when we lack confidence, as our failure might confirm we are not as skilled as we thought we were. So it’s important to really nail down what exactly one is afraid of.
In regards to how fear can limit us, there are three main ways.
Fear is stressful- Fear induces our bodies into a flight, fight or freeze response. This was once evolutionarily advantageous, but today our brains can’t tell the difference between being chased by a tiger and being afraid of rejection, being fired or the fear of losing money on a risky business idea. All it knows is that there is a threat, so it mobilizes us accordingly. When this happens, we are not as cognitively effective, healthy or aware of details.
Fear creates aversive states- The state described above also pairs risks with fear and stress, and we then avoid this aversive state at all costs. We miss out on many experiences because of it.
