The Mindset Mentor - How to Beat the Fear of Failure

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Do you struggle with the fear of failure? In this episode, I’ll break down what fear really is, how to retrain your brain to push past it, and the mindset shifts you need to finally take action and create the life you want. Are you ready to stop procrastinating and break your bad habits? If so, I just opened the doors to Mindset 2.0—my full system to help you break through fear, rewire your identity, and follow through like never before. Click here 👉 https://www.coachwithrob.com/enroll-a The Mindset Mentor™ podcast is designed for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life. Past guests of The Mindset Mentor include Tony Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, Jay Shetty, Andrew Huberman, Lewis Howes, Gregg Braden, Rich Roll and Dr Steven Gundry.   Here are some useful links for you…  If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here: Instagram  TikTok Facebook Youtube

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial, if you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you've ever gotten any value from anything I've ever put out, do me a favor. Just share a podcast episode with one person today. It means more than you could possibly imagine. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how to beat the fear of failure. I'm talking about the fear that I hear more than any other fear that comes up.

When I hear, and I go on a live and I ask people, what's your number one fear? At least 60, 70% of people say the fear of failure. And it can be paralyzing. It can be energy sucking. And it stops more dreams than rejection ever could. And so let's unpack it. I want to go deep into this fear, not just like the surface level like, hey, feel the fear and do it anyways type of stuff. I actually want to talk to you about what is going on in your brain when you freeze at the thought

of screwing up in some sort of way, and then how to retrain your brain to move through it in those moments. I believe that fear, this is my personal belief, fear is the absolute worst thing in the world. It is. There is nothing in this world that is worse than fear. It might sound dramatic, but it's my belief because fear stops people from starting a business, from pursuing their dreams, from speaking their truth, from asking that person out to living a life of true purpose, to leaving a toxic job or a toxic relationship, to living, you know, not living

a life that lights them up. Fear is the core of war. Like most people are like, well, we're afraid that they're going to attack us, so let's attack them first. So I believe that fear is the absolute worst thing in the world. And it holds probably 95% of humans back from doing what it is that they actually put here on this earth to do. And the wild part about it is that fear isn't the thing that you think that it's about. Like people are always like, I need to deal with my fear of failure. And I'm like, actually, that's just what you're seeing. There's a whole lot of psychological processes that's happening before you ever get to the idea of the fear of failure. It's not really the fear of failure, it's what the fear of, it's what the failure might reveal about you. You know, and so people

think, oh, if I fail, then I'm not good enough. If I fail, then I'm a fraud. If I fail, then everyone will judge me. If I fail, then there will be proof to other people that I am unworthy. And those things that happen. So I always say, you're not afraid of failure. If you think that you're afraid of failure, ask yourself what happens after you fail. Ask yourself, Ask yourself what you think about yourself when you fail. Ask yourself what you think other people will think about you when you fail. Those right there, those things are the real monster that's under the bed. You're not scared of the fall. You're scared of the mirror that it holds up in front of you. When you fail, it's like a mirror put up in front of you and you can now go, okay, well, what do I think

about myself? What we're really afraid of is not failure. It tends to be exposure in some way. at the root of most fear is this one terrifying belief. If I try and I fail, the world will finally see that I'm not enough. You are probably afraid that people will see you the way that you see yourself. That's what it comes down to a lot of times. If I fail, they'll finally see that I'm a fraud. They'll finally see that I'm not good enough. They'll finally see that I'm not smart enough.

They'll finally see that I'm not worthy of love. They'll finally see that I'm stupid. They'll finally see whatever it might be that you think about yourself. So you don't actually feel your failure. Failure is just basically the portal for you to see what you think of yourself. And so I want you understand you're not afraid of just the failing. You're afraid of what you think happens after you fail. and what people reflect back to you of what you think about yourself.

That's why so many people would rather stay stuck than try. Because mediocrity feels safer than risking, putting yourself out there, and people seeing that you're not enough. Notice I say the word feels because mediocrity feels safer. If I don't risk anything, I'll be safer. But one of my favorite phrases around this is if you don't risk anything in your life, you risk everything. If you don't put yourself out to be able to be seen or judged or to risk something, then you're risking your entire life. Mediocrity feels safer than actually risking putting yourself out there in people seeing that you're not enough. But here's what most people

don't realize. Your fear is not protecting you. It's preserving your insecurity. And so think about that for a second. We think that our fear is protecting us from something. But really what it's doing is that's preserving our insecurity within us, whatever that insecurity might be. If I don't put my gifts out into the world, then if I don't put my gifts out into the world and then fail in some sort of way, then I will not be exposed. I'd rather sit in silence and hear in the darkness for the rest of my life so that therefore I can't be judged and people can't see my insecurities. So we're trying to keep that wound, whatever that wound is, untouched, unchallenged in some sort of way, unseen. We've got to hide it in the shadow.

So if you don't launch that thing, if you don't start that business, if you don't ask for more, if you don't put yourself out there, you'll never be seen. And if you're never seen, then you can never feel like the failure that you might think that you are already inside of you. Because as long as you don't try, you can pretend that the fear is not real. But if you do put yourself out there, oh shit, well now you open yourself up to being exposed. When you put yourself out there, you open yourself up to failing, to being seen. There's a Native American quote that I heard years ago that I love and it says the brightest light gets the arrows. And it's like, we don't want to be the brightest light. We want to stay in the shadows because if we're the

brightest light, it opens us up to exposure. It opens us up to judgment and other people's opinions, all these arrows. No, we'd rather not be a bright light. So what do we do? We decide to stay hidden. We decide to stay small in some sort of way. You don't want to open yourself up to being exposed because if you get exposed, you might get rejected, you might get judged, you might have haters, whatever else you might be afraid of. And so what failure actually is? Like, let's look at failure in itself. One of the things I love to do with coaching clients that I've done before is just say like, okay, what is failure to? Define failure. And as you start to ask somebody more questions about failure, they start to run out of answers. And the reason why is because they've never actually

played it out. Because they're like, oh, well, you know, if I'm a complete, I'm afraid of failure okay what's failure mean to you means trying something and not succeeding okay what are you afraid of of trying not to see well I don't know I'm not really afraid of okay well but then they always go well but I know I've got to like I've got to fail in order to succeed anyways and it's like they kind of walk themselves into an own circle and they're like oh this doesn't really make a whole lot of sense so like let's let's redefine it for you right failure is not falling down on the path the way that I see failure is not falling down on the path failure is staying down. Failure is giving up. Failure is self-abandonment. You cannot fail at something

if you don't give up. That's the crazy part about it. Only at the point when you give up, does that become a failure? Like if you say, I'm going to start a business. And then you just never give up on the business, you will eventually figure it out in the next 5, 10, 20, 30 years how to succeed. The only time when that business becomes a failure is when you give up on the business. And so what if I just decide to never give up? Because like falling down, missing the mark, messing up, no, that's not failure. That's feedback. That's data. That's how you learn. You know, you, that's how you build a multi-million dollar business. You know, Honda, the guy who created Honda, one of my favorite quotes of his is success is 99% failure.

Like, literally a multi-billion dollar company. The owner and started of it said success is 99% failure. The great thing about success is that you only have to not fail one time. That's it. Because if you only not fail one time, that means that you succeeded. And so put that on your, you know, your bathroom mirror, whatever you think will wake you up. Okay, success, it's 99% failure. You only have to not fail one time. And the way I see failure and success, like if I were to go up to somebody to say, what's the opposite of failure. They would say success. What's the opposite of success failure? I don't actually see success and failure as opposites at all. I see them both as two sides to the same coin. Like you cannot

have one without the other. You cannot succeed without failing and you cannot fail without the opportunity of success. So let's talk about how to, in your brain, get over this fear of failure. Because here's the thing. If your brain has some sort of fear, it's trying to protect you from something. That's what you have to understand. It's just a protection mechanism. And so let's try to break apart this protection mechanism. Fear, the first thing you have to understand when you look at it is fear is a trained response. Fear isn't always rational. It's usually been trained into you in some sort of way. It's, you know, something once happened in your life that made you feel shame or judgment or rejection. And your brain logged it as danger, danger, danger. That hurts so much,

emotionally that I never want to do that again. I never want to put myself out there again. So now what happens is every time something feels similar to how you were hurt in the past in some sort of way, you flinch. If you have pain in the past, it's going to predict your fears in the future. Any fear that you have comes from some sort of pain in the past. So like when you feel like, oh my God, this is, if you get into a relationship with somebody, they absolutely break your heart, then the next time that you get into a relationship, you're going to have some fear around it because it hurts so much the last time that that happened. If you had a business fail and you want to start another business, of course you're going to have so much fear around it because it hurts so much.

You put so much time and energy and you got ridiculed when that business went down. Of course you're going to try to protect yourself from it. It is a protection mechanism. The question is, and what you need to dive into your own psyche, is what is it trying to protect me? from. That's the question to ask yourself. But here's the good news. If it's been trained into you, it can be retrained. You can train it into something else. It's not going to happen immediately. It takes time to train. Like, you don't just train a dog one time and just leave it. Like, you've got to retrain the dog for a while in order for it to follow the commands. The same exact thing with your brain. You know, you know to create a great life, you must get out

of your comfort zone. You must find your fears and work through them. And the thing about your comfort zone and fear is that fear is just the physical manifestation of your comfort zone. Like, you can feel your comfort zone in your body because when you're in your comfort zone, there's no fear. When you're starting to push out of your comfort zone, well, that's when you start to feel fear. So if you can remind yourself, okay, I'm feeling fear within my body, what did that crazy

podcaster say? Oh yeah, he said that fear is the physical manifestation of my comfort zone. so I actually should start thinking of fear as expansion and not danger and so I need to reassociate the way I think of fear like fear is I'm on the edge of my comfort zone this is where the magic happens you know we've trained ourselves unconsciously to feel fear and back away our entire lives feel fear back away for feel back away now you can feel fear and you can go okay hold on this is the this is the edge of my comfort zone instead of backing away you're going to now reach train yourself just to lean in a little bit. Just lean in a little bit. And when you don't die

from leaning in just a little bit, it will train your brain to realize that it's not really as much danger as you think that it is. And it'll stop needing to protect yourself. Your brain won't need to protect yourself from it. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you've got to develop what I call failure amnesia. Success doesn't come from avoiding failure. It comes from forgetting it long enough to just try it again. You know, failure or amnesia. Forget how many times it didn't work. Forget all the times that you were stupid. Forget all the times that you screwed stuff up. Remember the one time that it did work. Or focus on the reasons why you will succeed. Not why you haven't succeeded. You know, you never walk through the same river twice because you're not the same

person. It's not the same river. It's an old proverb. And so your past isn't a prophecy to your future. It's just the past. In the greatest athletes, that I've ever seen, have failure amnesia. You know, if Michael Jordan missed the game-winning shot last night, he still wants to take the game-winning shot tonight. That's the failure-a-emnesia I'm talking about. You've got to forget about last night. You've got to forget about your last shot.

It's this shot that we have to think about. So that's number two. Number three is to learn to rewire yourself talk your mid-freakouts. You know, your brain is always going to catastrophize fears. That's fine. Expect that it's going to catastrophize. And when it does, interrupt the pattern. It's called cognitive reframing.

In psychology, cognitive reframing is the practice of shifting how you think about a situation so it feels more empowering and less negative. So instead of I'll fail and it will expose me as being not qualified or, you know, an imposter or whatever it might be, stop it in the middle of thinking that and saying, hey, messing this up is not going to kill me. I need to do this to create the life that I want. and then repeat it until your nervous system chills out. Take a couple breaths.

Calm your nervous system down because it's had this fear ramp it up in some sort of way. Hey, messing up is not going to kill me. I need to do this create the life that I want. Messing up will not kill me. I need to do this to create the life that I want. And then move. Take a step. You know, start the business, send the email, launch the thing, whatever it is that you need to do.

You will not die. And your brain needs to see that you will not die because your brain thinks, oh my gosh if I move into this place that's outside of my comfort zone it's absolute danger so it paralyzes you you need to show your brain it's not that big of a deal the fourth thing to do just expect that you're going to fuck stuff up that's fine you know I expect to fail in every single thing that I do the most successful people I know are trying to fail as fast as possible because they know eventually if they have enough failures they'll they're oh this didn't work this didn't work this didn't work they're eventually going to figure out what does work. Expect failure. Don't let it stop you. Expect the dip. Expect the

what have I done panic. Expect judgment from other people. Expect typos and everything that you do. Expect that you're going to get some haters. But don't fear them. Just normalize them. They're going to come. That's the way that it goes. They're not the end. Screwing up is not the end. The fears, the haters, the typos, the judgment, all of that stuff. They're just the toll that you pay for the freedom of the life that you're creating. And then the last thing, the fifth thing, is be more afraid of the fear of regret than the fear of failure. I have all of the same fears as a normal human. Fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of other people's opinions. But my biggest failure that's way bigger than the fear of failure is I'm more afraid of dying and not seeing my true

potential than I am a failure. Like, I'm more afraid of regretting, getting to the end of my of regretting my life. That fear instead of holding me, the fear of failure can hold me back, but the fear of regret at the end of my life drives me to take action. Like just let that land for a second. Your fear of failure, it'll always be there. But the fear of regret, the fear of staying small, the fear of not living up to your potential, that's unbearable. That's not what I want to deal with. And so I want you understand this. Fear is just going to be there. Your fear of failure is going to be there. Successful people in life when you look at them, they feel all the same. fears that you do. They don't lack fear. They just refuse to bow to that fear. They feel a fear

and then they do actually do it anyways. And so if you have the fear of failure, what I want you do is I want you to listen to this, go step by step through it, find out what you're fearing behind it, find out how to cognitively reframe it, and then don't listen to the fear. Do it anyways and create the life that you want. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories, tag me at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-L-J-R. as I said, share it with so much you know and love. If you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of the podcast, I have many ways of coaching people outside the podcast. Go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coach with rob.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same

way. Leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day.