Fear of failure can be a great motivator. But it can also keep us stuck. Sometimes we respond to challenges and threats head on. We are nervous about the presentation we have to give, but we see it as an opportunity to grow. We work hard to make sure we don’t just deliver it, but we excel at it. At other times, faced with a challenge that makes us anxious, we procrastinate, postpone, avoid dealing with it.
On a fundamental level, we could argue that the successful entrepreneur is not that different from the perpetual procrastinator. Both are driven by fears and insecurities.
Whether they grew up with a father who never paid them much attention, or with a father who raised his voice one afternoon and told them they get everything wrong – each has been through childhood events that have left a long-lasting impact. Whether it’s fear of failure, tendency for perfectionism, people pleasing, our experiences define the way we relate to life.
And yet how come two people who are both driven by fear of failure respond in two radically different ways? For both of them, their actions are in response to underlying insecurities, fears and anxieties – yet one’s engaging in what we may call self-destructive behaviours, while the other in self-advancing behaviours. One is stuck in their life, career, personal relationships, while the other is advancing their life.
Fear activates our fight / flight / freeze response
Threatening situations activate our sympathetic nervous system. This leads to the release of hormones, such as adrenaline and noradrenaline that prepare our body to respond to the threat.
We tend to envisage physical danger when we think of threatening situations – a dog barking, a drunken person screaming, torrential rain on the motorway. But threats can be psychological, too – stress, anxiety, and depression.
We respond to threats by either fighting (taking action to remove the threat), fleeing (avoiding the threat, pretending the threat doesn’t exist), or freezing (doing nothing).
From that perspective, the successful creator, or the young entrepreneur, driven by fear of failure, is in fight mode. They’re doing all they can in order to make sure that they don’t fail.
The procrastinator, on the other hand, the person who talks but rarely does, who plans but doesn’t execute, who is paralysed by perfectionism, is most likely driven by a combination of flight and freeze.
Why does fear of failure keep us stuck?
Fear propels us into action when we imagine that the future holds less pain than the present. It keeps us stuck when we envisage that the future may hold more pain than the present. This vision of the future is often a blind spot – it’s buried in our subconscious and we’re not actively aware of it. But it is the driving mechanism behind our actions.
When pain and fear are just about tolerable, they keep us stuck. But when the pain of our current life outweighs the pain we fear the future may hold – we move forward, we take action. People who have led unhappy, unhealthy, unproductive lives tend to change when the pain of their current life becomes stronger than the fear of what the future may hold.
Would you rather be a procrastinator or an entrepreneur?
Given the option, most people would probably choose the adaptive rather than the maladaptive response – they’d rather be the entrepreneur than the procrastinator. But neither is ideal.
One is trying to avoid a bad present, the other one is trying to avoid bad future. One is motivated by the fear of future pain, the other one by the current pain. Essentially, both are driven by the idea of the life they don’t want – not the idea of the life they want. They’re in reaction to something negative – be that present or future. Their actions arise from a desire to avoid something .
So even though one of these scenarios may appear perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, by western society’s standards, while the other may be seen on the more problematic side – they both are undesirable. Each warrants examination of the underlying forces that drive the behaviour.
For the person with a tendency to procrastinate, what fear does the future hold? And what is the foundation of that fear such that the future is scarier than the present? For the driven creator, entrepreneur, student, what aspect of your life as it is are you finding it difficult to be with?
These are uncomfortable questions. But they may lead to more comfort overall. In the words of Jung, unless we bring the unconscious into the conscious it will drive our actions and we’ll continue calling it fate. Understanding what really is at the root of your ambition or procrastination – who you are that gives rise to either – is a route to living a healthier and happier life.