By Books Author Denise Turney

Inner blocks make it hard to advance. Low expectations are inner blocks that can be hard to get through. If you’re feeling stuck, it might be time to ask yourself this simple question – Are you afraid of failing?

If you’re afraid of failing, you’re not alone. After all, failure doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t matter how confident, hopeful or positive you are. Failure comes with a hard, gut punch that can make you feel like you’ll be stuck in an unwanted experience forever.

Are You Afraid of Failing – Hiding Won’t Help

Another element about failure is how it can find you thinking that, just because you slipped up once, you’ll get tripped up again and again. This is how failure can seem powerful. Yet, the key isn’t to run from failure. In fact, if you hide or run from failure you might:

• Convince yourself that an unchallenging, listless life is what you came to this earth to experience (And I’m betting that you know better than to believe that’s the truth.)
• Turn down offers to take on higher levels of work (For instance, you might turn down the chance to get promoted into a people management role at work or you might turn down the opportunity to lead a social or community organization.)
• Criticize others, accusing them of not supporting you enough, if you do accept greater responsibility and fear that you’ll fail (In this case, it’s as if you want someone to map out what you need to do. Or you might want someone to coddle you so that, if events don’t turn out good, you can blame the other person.)
• Jam your schedule with “busy work” so you’ll have a ready excuse as to why you can’t accept a new challenge.
• Paralyze yourself with fear or dread and make it painfully hard to make good choices and advance. Furthermore, this could cause you to stay stuck in unrewarding jobs, financial situations and relationships.

No Fun Living The Safe Life

As with other safe life choices, running from failure might feel comforting. But, if you keep it up, you could find yourself slipping into boredom. You could find it difficult to feel engaged with life. So, what can you do?

How can you start to move beyond a fear of failure? To begin, admit that you are believing you have failed. Admit that you are feeling as if you dropped the ball. These feelings may come in the form of embarrassment, irritability, agitation, shyness or anger. For me, when I think that I’ve failed or that I am failing, I tend to experience feelings of agitation, fear and anger. If I don’t start overcoming failure, I can struggle to sleep. On top of that, I might replay a recent area where I think I failed over and over in my mind. Talk about irritating.

After admitting that you think and feel as if you’ve failed, accept that success is not final, and that failure is not fatal. Consider this. Your greatest achievements are experiences that came and went. For example, you might have been an academic, creative or athletic standout in high school. Fast forward 20 years and you might be struggling to drop 15 pounds and get back in shape.

Failure Is Not Permanent

That or you might not have continued to learn or engage in creative arts. Whether you noticed it or not, you lived out the fact that success is not final failure is not fatal. It also helps to realize that failing forward could find you enter the very experiences that you’ve dreamed about for years.

In other words, changing the way that you perceive failure could help reduce your fear of failing. You might discover that failing is a part of trying new things and learning. Here are more actions that you could take to start overcoming failure beliefs.

• Revisit a time when you took a huge leap forward after you learned lessons that popped up during a perceived failure.
• Break at least three routines each day. For instance, you could brush your teeth at the kitchen sink, eat breakfast on the back porch or take a shower in your guest bedroom.
• Raise your hand to work on a new project. Be willing to learn, make mistakes and grow.
• Speak with someone new once a week. A simple “Hello” could help strengthen your confidence and make you more open to failing forward.

Face What You’re Feeling

• Approach a large project in parts rather than looking at it as one huge “thing to do”. This way, you could see mistakes as recoverable and not as definitive or lasting.
• Enjoy being outside in nature. Give yourself time to unwind and not worry about new, challenging situations that appear in your life.
• Talk about your fears around failing and taking on new challenges with a trusted friend.
• Pray and trust the Creator for inner vision to see that you are greater than anything you could face.

The sooner you start dealing with a fear of failing, the better. After all, being afraid of failing can take a strong swing at your self-esteem. A dipping self-esteem could cause you to think that you don’t deserve good relationships, to keep trying to advance or to realize or dreams.

Look around and you may spot people who’ve fallen into this trap. They live inside the shell of routine to the point that they appear to be living the same day over and over. Take this route and you could feel like you’ve only lived 10 original days over the course of two years.

That’s not what you want.

Dream Big and Soar

So, start identifying the emotions and beliefs that you associate with trying and learning, also known as “failing”. Remember how you tried, failed and learned when you were a kid. In fact, some of your biggest lessons came to you while you were growing up.

Revisit the courage that the child in you is so familiar with. After all, it was through trying, failing and learning that you started to walk then run. Had you not seen the joy in trying, failing and learning, you wouldn’t have learned to read, play fun games, create art pieces and so much more.

Don’t live stuck in routine and fear. Dream big and dare to fail. However, don’t seek to fail. Instead, seek to learn and grow.