Why Fear of Failure Feels Like Dying: Unpacking Emotional Traps

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Hey there.

Welcome to your ultimate life.

Your ultimate life.

This is number two of a series of 81234 581-234-5678 Podcast episodes I'm going to do on fear and the impact it has on our lives.

And, you know, we can live a long time without realizing how much fear is in the equation of things we do.

Whether or not we go have a conversation, whether or not we go talk to the boss about a project or about a raise.

Whether or not we raise something difficult with a coworker.

Whether or not we talk to one of our kids when something seems out of order.

Whether or not we have a difficult discussion with our spouse or mate.

Whether or not we're willing to look in the mirror and have a conversation with ourselves about something that buggin us.

We know it's not what we want, et cetera, et cetera.

And then we let it go on.

We let it go on.

And we let it go on.

You know that.

Raise your hand.

I hope you're watching the video.

I'm in front of a brick wall today.

Obviously, it's a background, but it's beautiful because fear sometimes feels like a brick wall.

Splat.

And so I'm going to do all eight of these things in front of this brick wall because I want you to know, just like this appears like a brick wall, only you see it's a little wavy.

Fear is imaginary.

That's a vinyl background.

I could go tear it down and it would be gone.

Fear is the same.

You don't have to live having fear be a controlling force of your life.

So let's talk for a minute about why I'm even doing this.

It's time to remind you, I think, about the purpose of your ultimate life.

I lived all of my life as a child trying to please my parents.

I lived my life as an adult trying to please my parents and those around me.

I spent my time believing that my responsibility was really to make others satisfied, to do what they wanted me to do.

Now, I don't know about you, but if you've lived like that, extreme people pleasing and all that sort of stuff, if you've lived like that, you know how unfulfilling and miserable that is.

Raise your hand if you identify with that.

So what are we afraid of?

I don't know about you, but I'll tell you what I was afraid of.

I was afraid of being wrong.

I was raised in a very fanatic sort of religious environment with kind of fanatic overtones.

So if I didn't do it right, I was going to hell.

I was damned.

I was finished, I was toast.

And that was going to last forever.

Not just for the week or for the spanking or whatever I got, you know, discipline for me, growing up today would be child abuse, beating.

In those days, we called it spanking, although it was quite severe.

I remember getting dressed last in the locker room, even in high school, wanting to get dressed last because I didn't want anyone to see.

I was black and blue.

So black and blue, you call it whatever you like, but anyway, fear.

Fear.

Fear of disappointing.

Fear of not doing what you're supposed to do.

Fear of having someone look at you badly.

Fear of, you know, not being.

Not measuring up.

Right?

Last time we talked about fear of setting goals, which is just one little piece of it, because.

And we talked about all the different possible reasons.

Today I want to talk about failure.

Fear of failure.

Now, fear of setting goals has a failure element in it.

So I could be afraid of setting goals because I think I'm going to fail.

I'll give you a personal example that still something I'm working on, right?

And this is push ups for some reason.

I have a wild story about push ups, and I fear them, as it were, more than any other exercise.

Not because I can't do them.

I can.

I did 75 push ups this morning.

Not all at once.

I can do about 50, right?

But I.

Every time I get down ready to do them, and I'm going to do as many as I can, right?

I'm going to do them to failure, meaning I can't.

I can't do anymore.

I start with I'm afraid.

A little feeling in my stomach, and I know what it comes from.

It comes from I won't do as many as last time.

I won't do as many as last time.

And therefore something's wrong with me.

I'm getting old.

My muscles are breaking down.

I ate too much.

I am a weakling.

I fill in the story and it doesn't bother me anymore.

I understand it.

I'm able to release that feeling and I do them anyway, okay?

But it took me a long time to understand what was going on and then get past it and do them anyway and be able to dismiss it so that it didn't affect my exercise.

Now that's a small example.

Maybe.

Maybe it's a big deal for you.

It's nothing for me anymore, but I still notice it sometimes.

Not every time, but sometimes I get that tense feeling.

So that's just one thing.

And I'm afraid that my lack of reaching a certain number means something about me.

It means something bad about me.

So I titled this episode why failure feels like dying.

And that might sound extreme to you, but let's look at some examples.

When people take surveys, and I'm sure you've heard this before, when people take surveys about greatest fears, it's not spiders or falling off a cliff or drowning or anything else.

On most surveys, fear of public speaking ranks at or very near the very, very top.

Well, I don't think anyone's died from public speaking.

I don't think there's any record of people dying from embarrassment or even forgetting every single thing they were going to say or even from tomatoes pelted from the audience because people didn't like what they were hearing.

Like, that's just not going to happen.

But the fear that is associated with dying or ceasing to exist is so great.

Our fear of embarrassment, of failing, of looking bad, of being judged, those are all words that we would use, are so great.

That fear of public speaking ranks at the top.

So let's dissect this a little bit, because that infects everything you do.

Now, let's pretend for a moment you're a business owner, you're an entrepreneur.

Maybe you're an author, maybe you're a coach, maybe you're an executive.

Maybe you just have a other kind of job.

Maybe you own a business, maybe you don't.

I, no matter who I talk to, no matter who I talk to about their goals, about things they're trying to accomplish in their life, fear of failure comes up all the time.

I just did an episode for a summit a few days ago where I was being interviewed, and the topic was high ticket sales, how to close high ticket sales.

And the person running the summit was interviewing me, and I was talking about how to close high ticket sales.

And after we talked a little bit about it, this person wanted to do a little role play.

So we did a role play of high ticket, and I said, okay, so tell me who you are and what you do.

And it's interesting.

Immediately, the scenario that he created was, he's a coach.

He sells packages that are $20,000, and he doesn't take the actions he could take to keep his pipeline full and close deals.

Now, maybe that resonates with you and maybe it doesn't.

That could be you don't do the connection work at work to get the raise you want, or you don't make the phone calls you need to make the sales you want, or you won't have a difficult conversation with someone because you're afraid of the outcome.

But the bottom line is that instantly and with a complete blank slate, that was the scenario which meant to me that that is very common, certainly consistent, consistent with what I see.

So as we went through, and this fellow is very experienced with sales and all kinds of stuff, so is his scenario was so common and so predictable.

He, as the person in the roleplay, wasn't taking the action, wasn't doing the follow up, wasn't making the calls and putting things off too long, letting contacts get stale and so forth.

Guess why?

Without any hesitation, I'm afraid I'll be rejected.

Fear of failure is fear of rejection even when I'm by myself.

And that little nervousness hits me when I hit the floor for push ups.

Fear of rejection, rejecting myself.

And you think, well, if you're by yourself, how can you be rejected?

Your inner critic is often the loudest voice in your chorus.

That voice that is, you know, is telling you, you can't do this, you shouldn't do this.

You're not good enough, you're not strong enough, fast enough, powerful enough, smart enough, too old, too young.

Whatever it is, is not always, but quite often loudest.

So let's dig into what makes that so powerful when you're young.

And this so often comes back to essentially, you know, the buzzword is childhood trauma.

But let's consider a situation.

Again, I'll use one out of my life, but you think of one of yours.

I would get grades, I remember, as early as first grade, and I would bring home a report card.

Now, in my first and second grade, I think, and maybe even third grade, they didn't use ABCDe.

They used three columns, satisfactory.

And whatever the skill was, mathematics plays well with others.

Counts to a thousand, I don't know, whatever the 20 things on the left side were.

And then the columns were satisfactory, was in the middle, outstanding was on the right, and on the left was more needed, meaning there was more of that skill needed to be developed or demonstrated.

In my universe, a more needed became a noun.

And it was one word.

I'm more needed.

And the question always was when I got my report card, is, how many more neededs?

M o r n e d e z.

How many more neededs?

Am I going to get?

And sometimes the, you know, the check mark would be on the boundary, which essentially was ABCDF or FDCBA because morneededs were on the left.

Isn't it interesting that I have such a graphic memory of the layout of the report card in first grade, which is some 62 years ago now, think about that for a sec.

Here's what I have discovered is the reason.

When I had something that was unsatisfactory, I was relegated to nothing.

I was dismissed.

I was useless, bad, you know, defective, wrong, failed.

The conversations weren't, oh, wow, we need to do more of that.

What do you think we can do?

None of that ever happened.

Now, I understand now, with an adult perspective, it was a reflection on my parents, especially my mom took it as a reflection on her that she was somehow failing as a mother, and she didn't want to be dismissed as irrelevant and a failure.

So then I got beat.

So I want you to think about those things in your life where failure has been met with a judgment, and failure is a broad term.

It just means it doesn't meet either your expectations or in this case, somebody else's.

Failure is a judgment that means you don't cut it.

You're not enough, not good enough, smart enough, whatever.

That judgment feels like death.

It feels like being dismissed when it's delivered with that kind of emotional pain, with that kind of emotional dagger to the heart.

On top of that, if the person delivering the verdict is someone you desperately want to love you, like a parent or someone else in your life, that you really, really, really want their approval.

And then the dagger comes.

Why?

Then it is triple bladed with 15 fishhooks, goes in and never comes out.

Now, I don't.

I don't believe.

I don't believe that my mom, you know, had any intention of creating that kind of pain and agony, even though it did.

My point is to understand you here now, in terms of creating your life a purpose, prosperity, and joy, which requires you and me to get rid of fear of failure, completely eliminate, eradicate, extirpate, whatever word you want to.

We got to get rid of fear of.

Fear of failure.

We're not going to get rid of failure, but we're going to redefine it.

We're going to re understand the things that have happened, and then we're going to get free of it.

Now, I want you to think about something for a minute.

Let's suppose right this minute you were free, emotionally, intellectually, physically, all the way in your body of any reaction to failure.

You didn't react to the word even failure.

Like you don't react to that word.

Or the idea of failing simply does not impact you at all.

Now, I don't know if you can imagine that, because for some of us it used to be this way.

For me, failure was rooted so badly or so deeply in non existence, or wanting to be non existent, to disappear both body and soul.

So I didn't have to face the shame, the disappointment, and often the physical consequences of having failed or let someone down.

So imagine for a moment that is completely gone, and any outcome, for any situation, is just an outcome.

And then you have to decide what to do with the outcome.

If you're like me, especially in the beginning, that was impossible to imagine, because the idea of an outcome being good or bad or right or wrong was inextricably intertwined or glued to the outcome.

Like this outcome, by definition, is bad.

The idea of separating the outcome from an emotional or drama definition of it was unthinkable for me.

So let's start from that place of recognizing that maybe you have had some or a little or a lot of that same kind of glue where outcomes you don't want, that we would normally call failure, are bad automatically, by definition.

And therefore you are bad by definition, and therefore you are worthless.

And you don't count.

You see how damaging and how many layers go there, right?

And especially with youngsters, youngsters that are in our care and keeping.

It is so easy to create multiple layers of damage and harm by having an outcome be bad, then having it go, they are bad.

And how come they didn't know better and worthless and so forth.

And when that goes on and on for weeks, months and years, then you see how damaging it is.

All right, so we now get the problem.

So what do we do about it?

You're an adult now.

Those things are not happening to you unless you allow it today.

So what we're faced with is we're faced with this whole pile of historical events that all happened, and we're not going to pretend them away.

But we now have the opportunity, in fact the right, in fact the sovereign control, to reinterpret or to re understand those things.

So let me ask you a question.

If you are trying to throw, you're trying to shoot a basket, play basketball and you miss, that is a failure.

What does that do to you?

Let's say you're trying to cook a perfect omelethe and you burn it a little.

What does that do to you?

Let's say you're trying to get a client for your business, and they say, not now.

What does that do to you?

Answering those questions honestly and thinking about the feelings associated with that will give you a sense of where failure is in your life.

Now, I'm going to suggest two things.

There's more to it, but I'm going to suggest two things.

One, when we allow failure to mean that we don't count, that we somehow suck, that is a symptom of not loving ourselves.

We have attached our value and worth to the outcome of some endeavor, right?

We know intellectually that that's not really true, but we act like that anyway.

So one piece of antidote is to work on self love.

Self love.

This is not some woo woo mind game.

Self love.

Like, if you have someone in your life, a kid or a spouse or a maid of some kind or an animal, like, how do you demonstrate love to them?

You pay attention, you speak kindly.

You're encouraging.

When things happen you didn't plan on, you help fix it.

Like there's no place in that universe for that negative emotion.

How do you treat yourself?

That's an important and powerful question.

Because if you are your own worst critic, then you're not giving love, self love to yourself.

And I certainly was part of that drama.

And so when I do my p tac personal truth and commitment, I am.

I have a statement in there that says, I am forgiveness.

I have compassion, patience and grace for everyone, for everything, including myself.

Now, that was really difficult for me to transition to, and it took a bunch of work.

But let me tell you the outcome.

The outcome is, I don't carry fear about failure, failure anymore.

I'm not afraid.

An outcome is an outcome.

If I speak at an event, I speak at the event.

If it went well, great.

If it didn't, then I look at it and think, okay, what else can I do?

Time you read the audience.

Was it too long, too short?

Was the topic wrong?

Just that kind of thing.

And so let me invite you with some truths.

Events are neutral.

I don't care what happens.

Nothing is good or bad until you make it.

So I use this example a lot, and it's trivial but illustrative.

It snows middle of October here in Edmonton, so it's going to snow pretty soon.

For some person, that's a very bad day.

For someone else, it's exciting because they're going to get to go skiing soon.

Same event, two different interpretations.

Good and bad.

That's easy to see and easy to understand.

But every single event in your life is like that.

Now, when you go to the self love or self loathing spectrum, if you decide, let's change some words.

Instead of having an outcome of an event be bad or good, why don't we just substitute the words did it work?

Did it not work?

I did something, I said something, I had a certain intent.

Did it work or did it not work?

Not work doesn't equate I'm bad, stupid, wrong, and therefore I'm worthless.

It doesn't.

If I call the event bad, it's an easy jump to the other.

So substitute your vocabulary.

Never say again, that was good or that was bad, that worked.

That didn't work.

That's what I meant.

That's not what I meant.

And use that.

Now you notice that I changed my tone of voice there, too.

That is also part of the, part of the problem and part of the prescription.

It's the problem if I use negative words, oh, that didn't work.

Oh, that didn't work.

That's a choice.

I don't have to assign emotion to it.

So if you think of it as an observation instead of a judgment.

So we've talked about three things.

Make your observations about conversations or outcomes of any kind to be just observations, not judgments.

Use the words work and not work to eliminate the emotional sledgehammer that often comes with fear.

Now, there's a whole bunch of other things you can do, and I'm going to recommend two resources for you.

One is a book that I wrote called walking without fear.

It's on Amazon, and it comes from some particular events in my life.

And there's some stories in there you might like.

Walking without fear.

And it gives you some very specific tools to use to eliminate fear from your life.

Fear of failing, fear of not being good enough to get fear gone.

Another book is called living with purpose and power.

Living with purpose and power.

And it goes right into the idea that we've talked about so many times, about a life of purpose, prosperity and joy, or your ultimate life.

None of these things, none of these kinds of changes will take care of themselves.

Now, I want to talk specifically about failure itself for a few minutes, because fear is the topic of all eight of these episodes.

And last one was fear of setting goals of failure.

And that's one of the big ones.

But what is failure?

Well, if I ask people what failure means, usually they'll say, well, you didn't get what you wanted or you didn't do what you wanted or something like that.

But if I ask them about a personal failure, it will immediately be tinged with that emotion and baggage.

What if, just because you can, just because you're an intelligent, capable, divine human being with sovereign control over your life, what if you defined failure as simply not getting the outcome I wanted?

And instead of the word failure, you might want to stop using it for a few days or week or a month, just because it might be so laden with baggage that that's difficult to do.

But if you simply allow that failing is simply I didn't get what I wanted.

I did not get the outcome that I wanted.

Now, if you're looking for your keys and you look in the chair in the living room and they're not there, most of the time, your first reaction isn't to throw up your hands and fall in a sobbing heap on the floor and say, I'm a failure.

The keys were not where I thought they'd be.

You probably don't give it much of a second thought.

You just look somewhere else and you might fail there too, and there too, and there too, and finally you find them and then you feel victorious, I got the outcome I wanted.

So I use those everyday examples because we do them.

We have examples where we fail and fail repeatedly.

And even if you look for your keys in 27 places, you're not going to be thinking, I suck, I'm stupid.

You're thinking, man, what did I do?

Where did I put those?

And you're even saying, where did I put them?

But you usually don't go there to I am therefore worthless.

And so that example is small, but it illustrates our ability and our total sovereignty about making choices or over sovereignty over making choices about what something means.

So let's decouple failure.

The word or the idea of failure from your worth not getting the outcome you wanted has nothing to do with your worth.

Not creating the circumstance or the situation you wanted doesn't diminish your value as a human.

And that's true.

Even if someone berates you and calls you something, has something bad to say, calls you names or whatever, you don't belong to that human.

You belong to the divine.

So can you imagine God looking down and say, because you can't find your keys, you now suck as a human?

That just doesn't happen, and we know that.

So your invitation here is to examine your relationship with the idea of failure.

Not getting what you want, not creating the outcome you want.

The suggestions are, stop making it.

Don't make it good and bad instead of good and bad.

Make it work, not work.

Did it work?

Did it not work?

Was it instead of, you know, some other language that is, you know, success and failure that is emotionally laden?

So that's one thing.

Another thing is to remember that you already live.

Examples where you don't get what you want.

And it's not earth shattering, soul shattering, like looking for your keys.

The last thing I want to talk about is the embarrassment factor when we do something that doesn't produce the outcome we wanted.

Public speaking is when we talked about.

So we get up in front of someone or a group or something and we forget half the lines or we get tangled up and so forth.

And so where do we go?

We think, that failed.

That sucked.

Do you know what the truth is?

The truth is almost every audience is rooting for you.

Almost everyone in the audience will tell you, ah, that wasn't so bad.

It was okay.

I've done that too.

And no one is there dismissing you as a human being, diminishing your value, your worth, or anything else.

So we have this false story now.

My offer to you is several things.

When I mentioned a book called walking without fear, I mentioned another book called living with purpose and power.

I'll mention one more thing.

Excuse me.

And that is my name, www.

Dot kellenfluekeager.

Dot ca.

Go look that up.

There's a free set of videos there called five master keys to your ultimate life.

And part of it is dealing with this topic of failure and having it means something different.

I like to call it an IDP, an interesting data point that didn't work.

The examples of that are many.

Edison was asked how many I felt to fail 900 times or something.

And he's reported to have said, I didn't fail 900 times or 997 or whatever.

I found 997 ways not to make light bulb.

That's not a joke.

It's a real truth.

And you have the power right here, right now to eliminate the grip that failure has on your heart and that the fear of failure has on your heart.

It does not reduce your value as a human being.

It does not reduce your ability to make money.

It does not reduce how you can add good to the world and create anything you want.

It may mean you need to do the experiment again.

It may mean you need to try something again.

Yeah, if I did this and I didn't get the outcome I wanted, I got to do it again.

That is not an indictment of your being.

That's just a comment on what needs to happen next.

So the point of this episode is to address fear of failure and help you realize everybody has it.

You don't have to keep it.

There are methods and tools, some of which I've discussed.

I've given you books and resources to get others.

Eliminate fear of failure.

Why would I say that?

Because if you take fear of failure out of your life, you are no longer afraid to have that conversation, to create that product, to promote that business, to go do things you want to try.

Can you imagine for a moment how different life would be?

What you would feel about yourself, how exciting things would be?

Eliminating fear of failure is one more step, and a big one, on the road to creating your ultimate life.

Your opportunity for massive growth is right in front of you.

Every episode gives you practical tips and practices that will change everything.

If you want to know more, go to kellenflukigermedia.com.

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