A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.

– George Bernard Shaw

A couple months ago I wrote an article on embracing rejection, the idea of which was that you can go a long way in life simply by developing a tolerance for blowouts. The same can be said of failure. In this article I want to explore the moving parts of failure and our fear of it, and offer ideas for changes you can make if you feel like this mental junk food is blocking your path to success.

The difference between rejection and failure is that rejection is an external response and failure is an internal response. If you audition for a role in a musical, and don’t get the part, that’s rejection. Whether it was a success or failure though is entirely your decision. If it was your first ever audition, you might be quite proud of your effort and feel excited to do it again. If it was the 20th time in a row that you’ve been turned down though, you might feel like a failure.

It’s hard to precisely measure the human and economic impacts of our collective fear of failure, but there’s no doubt that it gives even the worst viruses, diseases, and other human afflictions a run for their money. Fearing failure induces a kind of psychological quadriplegia–a paralysis by choice.

The Time Illusion

You can discuss failure only by discussing the past. Failure exists only in the dimension of time. But the past, like the future, is nothing more than a mental construct; it’s about as real as the Tooth Fairy.

At least the Tooth Fairy leaves money under your pillow. All you get for dwelling on the past is misery.

When you move fully into the Now, letting go of your case history and your worry for how things will turn out, the fear of failure disappears. Your awareness expands and your experience of reality becomes a pure present moment expression of consciousness, informed by the past and unfolding into the future, but being controlled by neither.

Negative Thoughts and Actions

Our belief systems create the context in which we succeed or fail. What you call a failure could just be a bug in your belief system. For example, you might believe that you’re a failure if you don’t meet your boss’s expectations. But is that belief rational? We’ve all had that boss who comes to us on Friday afternoon with an urgent task that is two weeks worth of work, and expects us to do it over the weekend. And while it’s nice to think that your boss would be open to a sensible discussion of what is and isn’t doable, it doesn’t always work out so nicely in real life. At this point you could either fire your boss, or discard the belief that attaches your competence to meeting her unrealistic demands, or do both.

Your lack of satisfaction in your results might be due not just to negative thought patterns, but negative action patterns. Realigning yourself with your intentions might mean adding a new habit or deleting an old one. If your intention is to lose weight, you might need to add a habit like drinking eight glasses of water per day. You might also get into the routine of eating breakfast every morning to avoid the metabolic slowdown that comes from skipping meals.

When I was 18 years old, I lost 55 pounds. I did it by adopting just four habits:

1. Eat a large breakfast every morning.
2. Taper your meals throughout the day.
3. Drink eight glasses of water per day.
4. Don’t eat after 7:00 PM.

That was it. No fancy diets, meal replacement shakes, or chest-thumping support groups. I just changed my habits, and that made losing weight and keeping it off a total non-issue. I don’t think about it or boastfully track how long I’ve kept the weight off. Through repetitive action, I made an identity shift which excluded the possibility of failure by making overeating incongruent with the person I became.

Dealing With Criticism

We also have a tendency to beat ourselves up over criticism, especially when it comes from people we care about and respect. Feel compassion towards your critics. Realize that criticism–particularly the trollish, inactionable kind–is more projection than honest evaluation. Haters often hate themselves, so they criticize others to temporarily bring their own self-esteem back above sea level. The other type of unproductive criticism comes from those who are really just having an argument with themselves, trying to yell loudly enough that others might agree and reinforce their point of view.

Incongruence

Incongruence is one of the last major ways in which we vandalize our efforts and create the conditions for failure. When there’s a mismatch between the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pillars of your life, you’re almost certain to feel unhappy, unhealthy, and ultimately judge yourself as a failure.

Incongruence can take many forms. For example, you might work at a job that you don’t really love, and thus be condemned to perform poorly, possibly even get fired. But is getting fired from a job you hate a failure? I don’t think so. When you live in disconnect between mind, body, and soul, you choose failure at the outset. In the best-case scenario, you might make a lot of money, even get a taste of power or fame, but you’ll never be happy. Being authentic can feel like “Mission: Impossible”, but it is the only road to Rome.

A lot of us are self-saboteurs. We constantly check our email, read blogs, channel-surf the web, or engage in other energy draining activities because we’re scared to death of trying and failing. But the only way to avoid failure is to avoid living. If you succumb to fear of failure, you force yourself to live a lie. You pet your little American Dream on the head even though you know it’s going to bite you in the ass one day. You’ll look back and realize that, while you might have existed for 75 or 80 years, you never lived a day in your life.

But failure is a judgement that you inflict upon yourself. Failing to meet your expectations is the result of disempowering habits and beliefs, and living life by other people’s rules instead of by your own. By expanding your awareness and making simple changes in your thoughts and actions, you can reframe failure as a stepping stone to success, using past lessons to better your performance and maximize your results.