The Mindset Mentor - How To Get Over The Fear of Failure

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. And if you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you happen to love this podcast, please do me a huge favor. Go to Spotify or Apple Podcasts or however you listen to us and give us a rating and review. The more positive rating reviews that we get on those platforms, the more that those platforms actually show this podcast to people who have never heard of it before. And that way we can grow and more people's lives can be impacted. So if you would do that for me, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. Today, we're going to be talking about how to get past the fear of failure. Let me say this before we dive into specifically the fear of failure. Let me say this before we dive into specifically the fear of failure.

Starting point is 00:00:46 I believe, and this is my own personal belief, that fear is the absolute worst thing in the world. And we can think back to the phrase, the famous quote, the only thing to fear is fear itself. I believe that fear is the worst thing in the world. And let me explain to you why I think that is. Number one, it stops people from chasing their dreams. There's so many dreams that lie dormant inside of the cemetery because people just didn't follow them because they're afraid of something. So it stops people from chasing their dreams. It stops people from having the life that they truly want, this one life that they get.

Starting point is 00:01:20 It stops people from starting a business. It stops people from asking that person out. It stops people from pursuing their dreams. Fear is also the root of hate because you fear what you do not know. We all fear what we do not know. And if you knew and understood the other person, their past, what they've been through, you can never hate that person, which means that fear is the root of war. You know, one country fears another country is going to attack them. And so what do they do? They attack first so that they don't get attacked because I don't want you to attack me. And so it's like, I'll go to war with you because I'm afraid of you attacking me.

Starting point is 00:02:01 So I'm going to attack you first because I'm afraid of death. And so I believe that fear is the worst thing in the world and it holds people back from everything that they truly want. And so when we go into the fear of failure, I mean, the amount of messages that I get of people that don't follow their dreams or haven't done what they truly want to do because they're afraid of being judged, they're afraid of what their mom's going to say, they're afraid of failing, they're afraid of what would happen if their business went under, all of these things. So they just don't chase what they truly want to do. And what's interesting about the fear of

Starting point is 00:02:35 failure is that it actually has nothing to do with failure. That's the interesting thing, that's what we're going to dive into deeper today, is the fear of failure has nothing to do with failure. It's the fear of your insecurities coming to light. Mine too. I have the fear of failure that pops up all the time too. I think that every single successful person has the fear of failure in some sort of way, whenever they go and they start something new. But just some people listen to the fear and do nothing. And some people don't listen to the fear and create the life that they want. But it's the fear, not the fear of failure. The fear of failure is actually a fear of my insecurities coming to light. At the center of everybody's fears is I'm not good enough. And if I'm not good enough, then I won't be loved.

Starting point is 00:03:20 At the center of every single person's fear is that I'm not good enough. And that if I'm not good enough, I won't be loved. If you think of your biggest fear, all of the fears of, you know, like I always hear, like, I'm going to run out of money, or I'm not going to be able to be a great parent, or whatever it might be. My business is going to fail. I'm going to screw up my relationship. All of those is because you feel like you're not enough to actually succeed in those. And if I fail at those things, I will be shown my greatest fear, which is I'm not good enough. This business failed, comes to the surface, my biggest insecurity. See, I'm not good enough to run a business. I should have just got a day job. I should have just stuck with a rat race. And so what happens is instead of

Starting point is 00:04:05 actually going out and facing their fears and possibly coming in contact with their insecurities, people go through life and, you know, I'd rather live a life of mediocrity so I don't have to see the places where I'm not good enough. And I fear being judged, so I won't start because I don't want to be judged. And if I do fail on top of that, I'll be judged even harder. And so we're not consciously thinking these when we have the fear arising inside of us. These are all subconscious thoughts is what if I do it and I fail? What if I do it and I'm judged? And what if I do it and I fail and then I'm judged even harder? and I'm judged? And what if I do it and I fail and then I'm judged even harder? And then my insecurity, my greatest insecurity of I'm not enough comes into play. And if I'm not enough,

Starting point is 00:04:51 I won't be loved. Because at the center of everything, every single human, no matter who they are, is just somebody who wants to be loved, somebody who wants to be accepted, somebody who wants to be heard, and somebody who wants to be seen. So we get afraid of this thing called failure. When failure is, you're going to see when I talk about it, amazing. It's a great thing. When you screw up, it's not failing. Failure is not final. Failure is a function of success. Failure is not final. The only time that you fail at something is when you give up at it. If you don't give up at something, it is impossible to fail at something is when you give up at it. If you don't give up at something, it is impossible to fail at it. Think about that for a second. If you do not

Starting point is 00:05:30 give up at something, it is literally impossible for you to fail at it. You will eventually, I promise you this, figure out what it is that you need to do to succeed. So what we see is quote unquote failure of, oh, I screwed up. No, you just, you didn't fail at anything. You just fell. Failure is not final. That failure, the thing that we think is failure in our mind is just a function. It's falling. We screwed up. Get back up. Keep going. You only fail when you give up. And when you see someone who's ridiculously successful, I think of somebody in your mind that when you see them, you're like, yes, that person is the epitome in my mind of success. It could be money.

Starting point is 00:06:10 It could be happiness. It could be fame. It could be great relationships, great parent. When you see someone who's successful, however you define success, what you really see is somebody who just didn't give up. That's it. What you're seeing is someone who didn't give up. That's it. What you're seeing is someone who didn't give up. The owner of Honda has the famous quote of saying that success is 99% failure.

Starting point is 00:06:31 The great thing about success is you just have to not fall once. And you figure it out, and it works, and it clicks, and almost everything that you've ever wanted just kind of falls into your lap. Hey, 2023 is approaching and it is the best time for you to grow into the best version of yourself. And one of the ways to do that is through books. Books have always been and will always be one of the most essential pieces to learning and growing. And that's why Blinkist is so amazing. Although many books have great content, a lot of them have what I like to call fluff stories. Stories that are put in the book to hammer a point home. but if you already understand the point, there's no reason to have five stories about that one point. And that's where Blinkist comes in. Blinkist, you can have all of the most important

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Starting point is 00:07:59 I was the sole person. And so over time I screwed screwed things up and screwed things up. And I figured out what works in the sales department, what works in the marketing department, what works in the operations department, put people in place, hired people, hired some of the wrong people. And I screwed up many times while building this company. Now we have over 30 people in the company and it took a lot of failure to build a company from zero people to 30 people. And I guarantee to go from 30 to 100, I'm going to have to fuck up a lot more stuff. And I'm okay with that. Because when I fail, okay, quote unquote fail, but fall and I mess up, I learn more. You learn more when you mess up than

Starting point is 00:08:37 when you do something right. I didn't just wake up and my business was doing well. No, there was a lot that had to go into it. And I probably succeed with my ideas like 5% of the time in my company. The rest of the time, I feel like I'm just throwing stuff at the wall and we're just going to see what sticks. And it was the same way with the podcast. Like with my podcast, this one, well, I like somewhere, whatever it is, there were over 1300 episodes,400 episodes. We had a lot of episodes, right? And I remember when I first started, I remember seeing a statistic that the average podcaster, and this is way back in 2015, so there weren't many podcasters back then,

Starting point is 00:09:19 but way back in 2015, that the average podcaster gives up after seven episodes. So I just made a decision. If I'm going to start a podcast, I'm not going to stop. Why? Because everybody else along the way is eventually going to give up. And if I just don't give up, I'll figure it out. I'll figure out my flow. I'll see what works, what doesn't work. And eventually, I'll be towards the top. And that was just my thought. Luckily, it worked. This is now the number one, always between number one and number three business and mental health podcasts in the world. It's one of the top 100 podcasts in the entire world out of every podcast. And there's like 1.7 million of them. And people always say like, what's the secret to success in podcasts? Tell me the secret. Like, how can I get to where you are in six months? I'm like, it's been years, years and years and years and years and years and years.

Starting point is 00:10:05 You know, we're going to be eventually pretty soon approaching 10 years running this podcast. I just didn't stop. I had bad reviews. I had crappy comments. I had emails saying that I didn't know what the fuck I was talking about, but I just kept going. That's what you have to do with whatever it is that you want in your life. you just have to keep going. Think back to something that you gave up on. Think of something that you really wanted two, three, four, five, 10 years ago that you gave up on. Think about that thing. Do you have it in your mind? Now think about where you could be if you just did not give up. Think about where that business could be. Think about where your business could be. Think about where your health could be. Think about where that relationship could be. Think of that thing that you gave up on years ago.

Starting point is 00:10:50 And if you didn't give up, where could you be right now? You would have a vastly different life, I'm sure. Now think about the thing that's in front of you that you're afraid to start because you're afraid of failing. Or think about the thing in front of you that you're currently doing, but you're really afraid of going all out because you're afraid of failing. If you fast forward five years now, where could you be if you decided not to give up again? Because you've given up on yourself many times out of the fear of failure. Where could you be if you didn't give up on yourself? You have to, what I have, what I like to call failure amnesia. You have to completely forget about the times where you've quote unquote failed and only think about successes.

Starting point is 00:11:35 Even if it's just one success, just think about that one success all the time. Because if I look at like personally for me, what pops into my head? So yeah, I have a successful business now, but I've had multiple businesses that were not successful, that I screwed up on, that I ran into the ground, that I lost all of my money, that I went negative in my accounts. I've had multiple of them. And if I would have taken that past event and place it into the future and not started because of what happened in the past, then I wouldn't have the business that I have now. You have to have failure amnesia. You have to think about the future more than you think about the past. Never walk, like when you think about who you are and what you learned, you never walk

Starting point is 00:12:13 through the same river twice because you're not the same person and it's not the same river. We're constantly changing. Life is constantly changing. And to think that what happened to you in the past is automatically going to be what happened to you and what will happen to you in the future is crazy. Because with my failed businesses, as an example, I learned how to not fail businesses because I failed businesses. So that's the important thing is that the past is not supposed to be placed into the future of, oh, this was the end result of this thing before. Like if you're in a relationship right now and you have, you're afraid to get it, or maybe you're afraid to get into a relationship because you've had some negative relationships in the past and you're looking at your negative relationships in the past and you're throwing them into your future

Starting point is 00:12:55 and saying, well, yeah, I probably shouldn't get into a relationship because my relationships in the past were like this. This is what my relationship in the future is probably going to be like. No, because you're not the same person. You learned what you want, what you don't want, how you don't want that person to show up, how you don't want to show up. You've learned from that. Same way that if you're, the exact same thing is true in the relationship as if starting a business. Have you had failed businesses in the past?

Starting point is 00:13:21 Or do you know people who have failed in the past? Sure, maybe. But you learn from all of these things. You learn from every single experience that you have in your life. The fear will never actually go away. I don't know if the fear will ever go away. Successful people are not fearless. They feel the fear, but then they just decide to do it anyways. You have to do the same. When you look at someone who you look up to that's very successful, maybe it's your uncle, or maybe it's someone, your grandfather, or maybe it's a friend of a friend or whatever it is, they're somebody who probably has the same amount of fears than you,

Starting point is 00:13:53 the same amount, but they just decide to do it anyways. Here is what I'm positive of though. That person that you see that is ridiculously successful has had way more failures than you. The people who are the most successful are the biggest failures. When you look at people like Michael Jordan, he was cut from his high school basketball team. When you look at people like J.K. Rowling, she had 12 publishers tell her that her book sucked. And then she finally got one to pick it up. She put out Harry Potter and all the Harry Potter series have sold more than 500 million copies. Imagine if she had given up after the 11th publisher.

Starting point is 00:14:31 You have to understand that everybody feels the fear of failure. But what you're really feeling is just a feeling of the insecurity of what happens if I do this and it doesn't work out and people judge me and I judge myself and I show, and I am shown that I am not good enough. I don't know about you. I'm more afraid of dying and not seeing my true potential than I am of quote unquote failure. I expect failure. I think you should welcome failure. Feel the fear and do it anyways. You're going to feel the fear. And when you're sitting there, you're about to go do something new. The fear will arise. You know, that feeling inside of your body, the physical feeling of like, oh yeah, I'm definitely feeling fear right now.

Starting point is 00:15:08 Okay. Breathe into it and then dance with the fear. Go and do it anyways. It's no big deal. It's not going to disappear. It might get a little bit quieter over time, but you're not going to die with no fears. You're just going to hopefully eventually learn to start working with your fears. So instead of it paralyzing you, it needs to propel you in some sort of way. Here's the issue though. You need to train yourself this way. You've been trained to be afraid of failure. Now you need to start training yourself to be okay with failure, okay with fear. Same way that Pavlov's dogs, they were trained that when you ding a bell, you get a treat. When you ding a bell, you get a treat. And so they eventually just dinged a bell and their mouth started salivating. Their body took

Starting point is 00:15:48 over before their brain did. What if you could start retraining your brain exactly the same to welcome the fear? To go, yep, there it is. I feel it. Let's go. So instead of it holding you back and paralyzing you, it actually starts to repel you. Expect the fear. Do it anyways. Dance with the fear. And remember this, you only have to succeed once. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Also, if you love this podcast, you want some extra stuff inside of your Instagram feed, follow the Mindset Mentor podcast on Instagram. That is the handle. And I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission

Starting point is 00:16:28 to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.

The Mindset Mentor - How To Get Over The Fear of Failure

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