Dr. Jim Taylor's blog

In my very first Kids & Culture Alert! newsletter published in April of 2005, I discussed the sad epidemic of fear of failure that was rampant in America then.  Well, almost four years later, fear of failure is still the most pervasive and debilitating issue among children I see in my practice and the thousands I have spoken to since. But the reason I want to revisit fear of failure today is because I have discovered a new wrinkle to the fear-of-failure phenomenon that brings greater clarity to the problems that children face in our increasingly achievement-oriented culture.

What is Fear of Failure?

At the heart of fear of failure is the belief held by children that if they fail, in school, sports, the performing arts, or socially, then bad things will happen, for example, they will disappoint their parents, be ostracized by their peer group, experience embarrassment or shame, or feel worthless. Fear of failure typically emerges from messages that children’s parents convey that being loved depends on their being successful or that their parents’ love will be withdrawn if they fail (this is rarely the message that parents send, but it is the one that children frequently receive). Children with Fear of failure perceive failure to be a ravenous beast that pursues them relentlessly and they only experience a small amount of relief when they succeed (and that feeling doesn’t last long). As a result, avoiding failure becomes their singular motivation and goal in life.

Despite this profound fear of failure, so many of the children I have worked with did nonetheless fail frequently and often monumentally, either by giving up easily or doing something that ensured failure, even when success was highly likely. I asked myself, why would children who fear failure so fear of failure.

Total Failure

I came to see that most children don’t have a fear of failure, but rather they had a fear of total failure. I define total failure as “giving it their all and not achieving their goal.” When I ask children if total failure is a good or bad thing, the response is unanimous and stark; it is the worst thing! So what is so bad about total failure? In a way, it’s the end of the road toward that goal. If children give everything they have and don’t achieve the goal, they have to admit that they simply weren’t good enough and there’s nothing more they can. This realization is, for most children, truly untenable. Better for children to fail with an excuse (called self-sabotage or self-defeating behavior) than experience total failure because it allows them to avoid the consequences of total failure and always leaves open the possibility of success in the future.

Yet I would argue that total failure is a good (though not ideal) goal because, even though children may not reach their goal, they did everything they could to achieve it and no one can ask more of them than their best effort. To put this in perspective, I define total success as children giving it everything they have and achieving their goal. Total success and total failure have one thing in common: giving it everything they’ve got. So the real goal for children is to experience “total” something, whether success or failure, because what more can they do. At the end of the day, will children be disappointed in not having achieved their goal? Of course, but there will also be indelible satisfaction at having given their best effort and fully realized their ability. Also, the simple reality is that if children don’t give it everything they’ve got, they will have little chance of ever reaching their goals or achieving total success.

Risks

One of the most destructive aspects of fear of total failure is that children are afraid to take risks. By definition, the more risks that children take, the greater the likelihood of failure. Yet risk is essential for achieving total success. Risk means children getting out of their comfort zones, pushing themselves a bit beyond what they thought was possible, and, most basically, risking the possibility of failure. Without risk, there can be little growth or progress, children are perpetually stuck in one place, and they can never realize total success. Unfortunately, another paradox about fear of total failure is that the only way to be truly successful is to take risks. So, children with a fear of total failure play it safe and avoid failure—that’s a relief!—but they also experience the frustration of unfulfilled promise and miss the exhilaration of having “left it all out on the field.”

Cardinal Rules

There are two cardinal rules that I have tried to live my life by and teach my clients and my own children. Rule #1 is that I don’t want any child to ask, at the end of a semester, season, year, career, or life, “I wonder what could have been?” That may be the saddest question anyone can pose to themselves because there are no “redos” in life. Rule #2 is that the one emotion I don’t want any child to experience is regret. Regret is defined as: “to feel sorry or disappointed about something that one wishes could be different; a sense of loss or longing for something gone,” in other words, “Darn it, I wish I had tried harder.” In the end, you want your children to make a statement: “I gave it everything I had,” and experience two emotions: pride and fulfillment in having given it their all.

To achieve their life’s goals, your children must embrace the following:“To achieve Total Success, I can accept Total Failure.” By doing so, they will have nothing to fear from failure and, as a result, are liberated to pursue success with unrestrained gusto.

Prime confidence is a deep, lasting, and resilient belief in your ability to achieve your goals. Prime confidence keeps you positive, motivated, intense, focused, and emotionally in control when you need it most. With prime confidence, you’re able to stay confident even when you’re not performing well (it happens to even the best athletes periodically). You’re not negative and uncertain in difficult competitions nor overconfident in easy competitions. It also encourages you to seek out pressure situations and to view difficult conditions and tough opponents as challenges to pursue. Ultimately, prime confidence enables you to perform at your highest level consistently.

Five Keys to Prime Confidence

I have identified five keys to building prime confidence that will create an upward spiral of confidence. Each key alone can enhance your confidence, but if you use all of them together, you’ll find your confidence growing stronger and more quickly. The ultimate goal of prime confidence is to develop a strong and resilient belief in your athletic ability so that you have the confidence to give your best effort, perform at your highest level, and believe you can achieve your goals in the most important competitions of your life.

Preparation breeds confidence. Preparation is the foundation of confidence. This preparation includes the physical, technical, tactical, equipment, and mental parts of your sport and means putting in the necessary time and effort into every aspect of your training. If you have developed these areas as fully as you can, you will have faith that you will be able to use those capabilities gained from preparation to perform as well as you can in competition. The more of these areas you fully address in your preparation, the more confidence you will breed in yourself. My goal with the athletes I work is, when they arrive at every competition, that they can say, “I’m as prepared as I can be to achieve my goals.”

Mental skills reinforce confidence. When I work with athletes, I encourage them to create a mental “toolbox,” inside of which they will put essential mental tools that they will need in training and competition (fortunately, your mental toolbox doesn’t weigh anything, even when it’s filled with tools!). Just like having a spare tire, tire iron, and jack if you get a flat tire while driving, the tools in your mental toolbox are available when you have breakdowns in your sport, for example, you get tired at the end of a competition, you have a period of poor play, or you have a close call go against you. Tools that you can place in your mental toolbox can include inspirational thoughts and images to bolster your motivation, positive self-talk and body language to fortify your confidence, intensity control to combat confidence-depleting anxiety, keywords to maintain focus and avoid distractions, and emotional-control techniques to calm yourself under pressure.

Adversity ingrains confidence. Like most athletes, you probably love to train in ideal conditions when you’re healthy, rested, and on your game. But how often do you compete under ideal conditions? Probably rarely. More often than not, the worst conditions come out when you want them least. But it isn’t the conditions that determine who succeeds and who fails because, for example, two athletes can face the same conditions, but view and respond to them entirely differently. Athlete A may see them as a threat that causes negativity and anxiety. Athlete B sees those same conditions as a challenge and becomes motivated and excited. So who do you think is going to succeed? The challenge is to maintain your confidence when you’re faced with the worst possible conditions.

To more deeply ingrain confidence, you should expose yourself to as much adversity as possible in training. Adversity can be environmental obstacles such as bad weather during soccer game or a strong headwind in a running race. Adversity can also involve your opponent, for example, who is a little better than you or who has a style of play that frustrates you.

Training for adversity has several essential benefits. Adversity increases your belief that you can responds positively to the difficult conditions because you’ve shown yourself that you can in training. It shows you ways to adapt to the adversity so you can make those adjustments in competitions. Training for adversity also familiarizes you with hard conditions, so when you get to a competition with such demands, you’ll be confident enough to say, “No big deal, I’ve trained in these conditions before.” Plus, training for adversity just makes you feel tough!

Support bolsters confidence. It’s difficult to achieve success on your own. The very best athletes in every sport have many people supporting them. There will be times when things are just not going well and it helps to have people, for example, family, friends, coaches, and teammates, to whom you can turn for support and encouragement. Though your confidence may wax and wane depending on how you’re feeling, the quality of your training, and your recent competitive results, you want people in your life who you can count on to give you a “booster shot” of confidence, for example, have a coach say, “I know you can do it” or a friend tell you, “Hang in there. Things will turn around.”

Success validates confidence. All of the previous steps in building confidence will go for naught if you don’t then perform well and achieve your goals. Success validates the confidence you have developed in your ability; it demonstrates that your belief in your ability is well-founded. Success further strengthens your confidence, making it more resilient in the face of adversity and poor performance. Success also rewards your efforts to build confidence, encouraging you to continue to work hard and develop your capabilities.

But when I talk about success, I don’t mean just competitive success, at least not right away. You can’t just go out and have a big success to give you confidence. Your initial goal is to create little “victories” every day in training. When you walk away from practice, you should be able to say that you just “won” that day by doing what you needed to do (e.g., work hard, listen to your coach, focus on key areas of improvement, keep at it even when it really hurts, overcome adversity) to achieve your long-term goals. With each small victory in training that you accumulate, you move one step closer to that big victory, namely, achieving your competitive goals.

In my work with CEO’s and other business leaders throughout the world, as well as, top coaches and professional and Olympic athletes, I have identified 10 qualities that I have found to be woven, without exception, into the very fabric of these highly successful individuals. If you look at the business leaders whom you admire, I’m sure you will also see these attributes in them.

Identity. Prime Leaders have a strong sense of their corporate identity, that is, their unique qualities, capabilities, and contributions, in other words, who they are, what they can do, and what they have to offer their industry. Identity acts as the foundation upon which vision, values, strategy, goals, and efforts are derived. Identity is grounded its links to the past: “Where did I come from?” It is also tethered to its links to the future: “Where do I want to go?” A simple way to begin to establish your identity is to complete the following sentence: “My passion and purpose in life is to ____________.”

Vision. Prime Leaders don’t dwell on their present successes nor do they wait for their future successes to arrive. Instead, they have a far and wide vision of what success means to them and how they can achieve their unique view of success. Prime Leaders look far into their futures in their “crystal balls, ” see clearly what they want to accomplish, and then make the future a reality. Their vision also has great breadth with which they see the extensive range of opportunities that present themselves and from which they can choose. This vision affords Prime Leaders a clear and defined path to success.

Passion. At the heart of Prime Leaders is a deep and enduring passion for what they do. They don’t do what they do for the money or fame or power (though most certainly enjoy those perks!), but rather because they simply LOVE what they do. This passion is the basis for both their success and their happiness. They are successful because their passion drives them to put in voluminous amounts of time and energy into their work. They are happy because they are doing something that they absolutely love to do. This passion enables them get up every morning and throw themselves into their work. It also helps them to be great leaders because the people for whom they work feel and are inspired by their passion.

Ownership. Prime Leaders have complete ownership of their professional lives. They know that their careers are entirely of their making and, though luck and chance can occasionally play a role, they take charge by creating opportunities and don’t wait around for their careers to happen to them. Prime Leaders also take full responsibility for their successes and failures—“the buck stops here”—and, in doing so, have the power to replicate and build on the past successes and learn from and avoid past failures.

Determination. Successful people are maniacally driven to achieve their goals. They have a clear vision of what they want to accomplish and are willing to do what is necessary to achieve those goals. This determination is evidenced in the long hours they commit to their work , the quality and quantity of work that they produce, and their willingness to take on extra work or the dirty little jobs that others eschew. Research has shown that the most successful people are those who put in the most time and determination is the engine that drives that effort.

The Grind. Even for those with a great passion for their work, not everything they do is interesting and motivating. To the contrary, an unavoidable part of pursuing success is the minutiae and the just-plain-boring aspects of the job. All business people will reach that point in their work that is no longer fun or engaging. I call this the Grind. Many businesspeople will reach the Grind and either ease up or stop completely. But Prime Leaders understand that the Grind is the signal when their work starts to really counts and that this is the time that separates them from everyone else. They accept that the Grind is neither fun nor interesting and, instead, focus on how that mundane—though essential—work will lead them to their goals (which, by the way, is fun and interesting!).

Inspired by failure. Many people, when confronted by mistakes or failure, lose motivation and confidence to pursue their goals. They make excuses, blame others, and wallow in self-pity, none of which help them get where they want to go. Prime Leaders take responsibility for their mistakes and failures and use them to boost their efforts. Also, rather than defensively putting those mistakes and failures behind them, Prime Leaders do a “forensic analysis” and learn from them, so that they don’t repeat those mistakes and failures in the future. At a deep level, Prime Leaders take their failures and use them to inspire and motivate them to worker and smarter as they search for success.

Respond with challenge. An inevitable part of striving for success is that you will experience excessive demands, obstacles, and setbacks that slow or impede your progress. Such experiences can include difficult bosses, office politics, time deadlines, and insufficient resources to do the job. They can be discouraging because they make the climb to the top more difficult or even seem insurmountable. One of the most fundamental differences between typical businesspeople and Prime Leaders is how they respond to these difficulties. Many businesspeople perceive them as threats to avoid, causing negativity, anxiety, and fear. But Prime Leaders respond with challenge, in which they are motivated to actively confront the difficulties, are confident in their ability, and remain calm and focused in their efforts. Two businesspeople can be faced with the same difficulties and, all things being equal, the one who views them as challenges will responds positively, overcome them, and achieve their goals.

Crisis mastery. Perhaps the ultimate test of businesspeople is how they react to crisis. While many perfectly capable businesspeople crumble in the maelstrom of overload, time pressure, conflicts, and breakdowns, Prime Leaders respond with resolve, composure, and decisiveness. Being a master in crisis comes from self-discipline, time-tested confidence, a focus on the essentials, emotional control, and a healthy ego, in other words, developing the areas described in the Prime Business Pyramid.

Process focus. The bottom line of the business world is results, for example, productivity, sales, and profits. Unfortunately, too many businesspeople become preoccupied with results and this focus actually interferes with their attaining those results. Though results are always in the back of the minds of Prime Leaders (like a computer program running in the background), they understand that to achieve the results they want, they must focus on the process, that is, what they need to do in the moment, to accomplish their outcome goals. While others are talking about where they want to go, Prime Leaders are talking about how to get there.

Ask yourself whether you possess any or all of these qualities. If you do, you’re on the road to great success. If not, make those you lack a priority in your professional development because the simple reality is that without them, you will likely never achieve your highest goals.