Failure is one of the most common and deeply rooted fears people face.
“I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.”
– George Burns
Anyone alive on 26 September 1983 was, by sheer existence, close to death that day. Every soul who breathed that fragile air is lucky to have survived, and I count myself among them.
Back when the Cold War was at its bitterest, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a Soviet early-warning bunker.
Suddenly, to his nauseating horror, he saw the impossible flash across the computer readout: American nuclear missiles, inbound!
The long-dreaded nuclear war had begun! The nightmare was real.
Strict protocol required him to report the alert immediately up the chain of command. Doing so would almost certainly have triggered a Soviet retaliatory nuclear strike, hurling the world into nuclear Armageddon.
But something felt… off.
For the few moments Petrov took to pause with indecision, time stood still as the world hung in balance. Would it tip back towards continued life? Or would mankind be plunged into destruction in a nuclear winter?
We all know the answer.
Instead of following protocol, Petrov judged the warning to be a false alarm. What did he base his judgement on? Intuition – and a lack of corroborating data. So, he chose not to escalate the report.
Instead, he drank some vodka (who wouldn’t?!) and waited.
Miraculously, it was a false alarm.
By not reporting the readout, he prevented an instant retaliatory strike.
So, what happened to the man who prevented nuclear war?
The fate of a saviour
You may be wondering: Was Petrov hailed as a hero? Was he paraded through Red Square on the shoulders of grateful comrades? Given medals, monuments, maybe a lifetime supply of vodka?
None of that happened. His should be a name we all remember. But you’re probably in the majority if you’ve never even heard of him before.
What did happen is that Petrov was reprimanded for failing to fill out his logbook correctly. That’s right! The man who singlehandedly stopped World War III got a slap on the wrist for bureaucratic negligence.
No medals. No global applause. Just obscurity, followed by a quiet exit from the military.
His career stalled. He felt scapegoated and institutionally bullied afterwards, and he never received the promotions he might reasonably have expected.
Petrov was reportedly reassigned to a less sensitive post and took early retirement a few years later due to stress. A professional failure.
I don’t know about you, but I see this as one of the greatest success stories ever told!
So success is, at least partly, in the eye of the beholder.
The fact is, we can be too black-or-white when it comes to ideas of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. For proof, we need look no further than Lieutenant Petrov, the ‘failure’ who saved the world. In the eyes of a closed Soviet bureaucratic system, Petrov ‘failed’ because he didn’t follow protocol. Yet it was this very failure to comply with procedure that caused his success in saving humanity.
I’m so happy Petrov trusted himself, but many of us don’t. Some clients have such a fear of failure that they don’t even try to meet their needs or find fulfillment, feeling either that they are bound to fail or that failure itself poses the biggest possible threat. Such is the curse of chronic self-doubt – and our job is to help lift it.
The origins of failure fear
Chronic doubt over the ability to succeed, or even a lack of willingness to try, can develop in various ways.
It may be a habitual timidity – a habit of feeling fear when it comes to trying new things. This might manifest as an all-or-nothing approach to the very ideas of success and failure.
But why do some clients fear the idea of failure so much?
Fear of failure is closely linked to fear of rejection and criticism from others, as well as to procrastination and excuse making.
Often it tracks alongside perfectionism. For the perfectionist, anything less than perfection on a first attempt seems like a dismal and humiliating failure. The threshold for failure is so low that every attempt becomes wrapped up in shame.
But it’s not just our own attitudes that can steer us wrong.
The influence of others
The failurephobe may have been the unwitting victim of someone else’s perfectionism. Perhaps they have been put down by perfectionist parents or made to feel that “failure is not an option” – that trying and failing is deeply shameful and therefore a huge risk.
If someone has been harshly criticized by demeaning parents, teachers, friends, or colleagues, they may have internalized those outside expectations, coming to see failure as a reflection of who they are as a person rather than simply of their approach to a particular attempt.
Or perhaps our failure-averse client has been deeply embarrassed by an actual or perceived past failure and is terrified of feeling that bad again.
Ultimately, it comes to feel safer just not to attempt.
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Distorted perspectives
Those who fear failure may misconceive self-confidence as certainty of success, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Truly confident people aren’t the ones who know for sure they’ll succeed; they’re the ones who know they’ll handle failure if it happens.
The failurephobe may naively assume that success always happens without failed attempts along the way (we all see the relative success of celebs, but we don’t see the hidden part of their story, such as knockbacks).
They want success without risk or difficulty.
Perhaps they were mollycoddled by well-meaning but misguided parents so that they never got to taste defeat or adversity – and now as adults they just go to pieces whenever inevitable difficulties arise.
But let’s be even about this. Most of us are prone to fear of failure in some form or another.
A common torment
Failure is one of the most common and deeply rooted fears people face. It’s a fear of not succeeding when trying something new. Of never making it while pursuing a passion. And it’s a fear that stops people from following their hearts.
We may fear that a relationship will fail. That a business venture won’t get off the ground. That people won’t like us (so why bother trying to meet new people in the first place!).
We may fear intimacy, feeling we’re bound to be rejected or worrying that we are or will be a failure as a parent or lover.
The problem is, of course, that failure in one way, as perhaps our Soviet-era saviour may have agreed, can lead to success in another. You have to “crack a few eggs to make an omelette”, as they say, and failure is often a much better teacher than instant success.
Ultimately, life is too short to let fear dictate our life choices. After all, fear of failure carries its own risks, one of which is a regretful and frustrating life.
To succeed, we must be prepared and able to fail. Weirdly, successful people may be just as comfortable with failure as they are with success.
When a client feels they just can’t do something and is frustrated by that, there are several strategies we can try.
One: Encourage them to reframe what failure means
A client of mine related to me her shame at having studied Spanish intensively for years but never achieved the formal qualification she had hoped for.
We examined whether this was truly a failure… or a partial success? She was now able to converse fluently with locals in Spain, which is a real achievement and certainly counts as some kind of ‘success’.
You may not jump as far as you intended, but you have still jumped some distance.
Help clients explore the idea that a failure in one context might be a success in another. Remind them that history is full of examples, like Sir Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin through what was initially a failure to tidy up.
When a client fails at one goal, support them in exploring other dimensions of success that might have emerged from the experience.
Assist them in loosening black-or-white thinking around success and failure, and consider how many aspects of life, like relationships or careers, contain both ups and downs and how ‘success’ can sometimes only come from initial ‘failures’.
Two: Encourage them not to take it all personally
Sometimes our endeavours are too wrapped up with ego.
Clients who internalize setbacks may be more vulnerable to depression. So help them develop the habit of evaluating situations objectively. If a business fails or a relationship ends, guide your client to ask themselves, “What factors outside of my control contributed to this?”
Assist them in considering realistic external influences: Was it timing? Economic climate? Lack of support? Poor health? Sleep deprivation from looking after a newborn?
Help clients differentiate between responsibility and blame. If they had a role in an outcome, explore mitigating factors without encouraging them to avoid accountability. This balanced perspective reduces the emotional weight of ‘failure’ and fosters resilience.
Three: Help them move beyond the failure/success binary
Sometimes we need help to relearn what once came naturally.
None of us are born fearing failure. As children, we all explored, experimented, and acted without being hindered by the labels of ‘success’ or ‘failure’. So we can teach our clients to rediscover the mindset they had before they learned to fear failure.
Encourage clients to enjoy the process rather than obsess over outcomes. We go into the state of ‘flow’, sometimes called being ‘in the zone’, when we become totally now-focused. We inhabit our actions completely, without the past or future intruding at all. In these times, success can and does butt out. If it does occur, it’s simply a byproduct of the process. Encourage immersion in the process so that the outcome seems irrelevant until it manifests.
The next point may seem like a cliché, but like many clichés it contains great value.
Four: Frame experience as feedback
Just as children (and adults) can sometimes learn good habits by observing bad ones, we can also help clients see that every attempt offers useful feedback, not just a pass/fail judgment.
We learn by screwing up so that our re-approach might come closer to yielding results. Yes, it can be argued that it’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes than our own, but even when things don’t go as we hoped, we can glean data to inform future action.
Draw parallels with scientific research: A failed experiment is still valuable, because it informs the next step. Likewise, athletes, entrepreneurs, and artists constantly adjust based on results rather than judging each attempt in binary terms.
When clients perceive results as feedback rather than failure, they’re more likely to persist, grow, innovate… and “just do it!”
Five: Promote action and boldness
Encourage clients to take action rather than avoid opportunities for fear of failing. Support them to develop a mindset whereby ‘failing’ becomes part of the learning curve.
People who try many things are statistically more likely to succeed. Help your client see that each attempt, regardless of outcome, is a step forward. Reinforce the idea that speeding up their rate of failure may, paradoxically, speed up their rate of success.
We need to crush the grapes to make the wine.
But it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we want what we are supposed to want, which may not align with what we actually want. So what does your clientwant, independent of parental or even societal expectations?
Now what one small step can they take towards that? I will sometimes encourage my clients to do one small thing on the road to their attempt and then let me know when they’ve done that. Sometimes all we need to do to get going is to take the first step.
Six: Help them define their own success
Fear of failure often stems from fear of disappointing others. So help your client clarify their personal definition of success. Ask: “What does success look like for you? Not your parents, not society, but you?”
Is it purpose and meaning? Relationships? Physical wellbeing? Creative achievement?
Help your client pinpoint and appreciate their values and interests.
By understanding their own criteria, clients can begin to make choices aligned with their values and feel less pressure to conform to external standards that may not bring fulfillment.
Seven: Focus on the quality of the attempt and the adventure
Building on tip three, when working towards a goal we can make sure to focus more on the journey than the destination. We can hypnotically rehearse the steps of the attempt, not just the success itself.
One study found that visualizing only the success itself may make people less likely to actually succeed!1 While participants enjoyed imagining the success, those who visualized an end result but not what needed to be done to get there were less likely to engage in the necessary steps to achieve it.
One of my clients, Gareth, had a goal to read more books. So I asked him what steps he’d need to take in order to become more well read. With my help, he listed the following:
- Buy three books he aimed to read.
- Choose which one he’d read first.
- Set aside a time to read (in his case, before switching off the light to sleep).
Now that seems really basic, but we’ve gone from the vague goal to “be more well read” to actual steps. Visualizing the steps to success is much more important than having our clients hypnotically enjoy success that they haven’t yet earned.
Remember, it’s an adventure!
Life is an experiment and an adventure. And what adventure runs smoothly all the time? In fact, would it be an adventure if it did?
Some of the funniest and most entertaining people are those who can tell anecdotes of times they tried and failed at things. And humour has to be one of life’s best learning tools.
Shift your client’s focus from controlling outcomes to making the best attempt possible. Whether it’s an exam, a performance, or a job interview, outcomes can’t always be guaranteed – but the quality of preparation and presence can be.
When preparing clients for high-stakes situations, focus on helping them be calm, focused, and confident during the process, not just achieving the desired result.
Encourage them to measure success by how well they engaged in the process, rather than whether they got the outcome they hoped for.
You can guide your client towards a mindset of curiosity and flow, where the journey itself becomes the reward. This can help clients move forward without being paralyzed by the prospect of failing.
As for Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, well, he was eventually recognized for saving us all… sort of.
His actions became public in the 1990s, after the Cold War. He eventually received international recognition, including the World Citizen Award in 2004 as well as recognition from the United Nations and several peace organizations. A documentary about his story, The Man Who Saved the World, was made in 2013.
In short, the Soviet military did not reward or honour Petrov at the time. His bravery and judgment were only widely acknowledged decades later, primarily by the international community.
And yet the truly important thing was that the right thing happened…or perhaps more accurately, the wrong thing didn’t happen.
Some of the greatest successes in history have been and will be entirely unknown, and therefore go without recognition and reward. And we can all be part of that.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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