Fear of Failure: A True Story
Years ago I found myself leading a team of individuals in a very competitive and fast paced corporate environment. Like many businesses, success was measured in numbers as was each individual’s performance.
The team I had inherited ranked in the bottom quarter within this very large corporation. Initially I used standard methods of coaching. I would focus on one area of their metrics and low and behold their stats would improve in that area while the rest of their metrics plummeted. I felt like I was on a teeter totter, spending time fanning the fire here, while the fire was waning somewhere else. I could see that I was running myself ragged trying to provide an external source of motivation when what this team of wonderful individuals really needed was an internal sense of motivation and drive.
I wrote a short workshop in hopes of lighting that spark of intrinsic motivation that is in each one of us. I posed many probing questions to my staff regarding their dreams, ambitions, fears and apprehensions and then invited them to share their responses with me.
The results were staggering. Every member on my team of twenty some people, were afraid to fail and, therefore, felt it was safer and easier not to try at all. We worked together on this fear and at the end of the workshop something amazing happened. My team’s rankings shot up from the bottom 10 to the top 10 in our centre. By releasing their fear of failure, their intrinsic motivation and drive had indeed been sparked! For as long as I managed that team, their metrics stayed consistently in the top 10. Some of them went on to follow their dreams and at least one of them attained the fullest extent of the ambitions he had set for himself.
Fear of failure is probably the number reason we stay stuck right where we are. We live out our mundane lives and make up a million excuses of why we can't, while our dreams slip away. Does this sound like you? The Emotional Freedom Technique might be the first step in moving past your fear and right into the life that you dream of. Try a one on one mentoring session or check out the Tapping Into Your Success workshop.
