2016 How to Transcend Fear of Failure

A pattern that seems to have come up and seeped into my mind and thus how I experience myself in my life and living, is a fear of failing. In the back of my mind there have been thoughts and experiences coming up that have created this overall feeling within myself that I have somehow 'failed' and/or am failing in my process of self-change and self-expansion. I've been struggling with that experience for a while now, which has also seemed to result in avoidance behavior such as sleeping a lot and not really wanting to wake up and face the day/my life, not feeling like maintaining my 'social life' and not really feeling like doing things in general. In the back of my mind there is just this experience and idea of 'what's the point, I've failed anyways'.

And when looking at this experience, I can see that it's basically just a fear of failing that I am dealing with. A fear that I have made real by believing it and thinking it the whole time. I have molded and shaped my perception of who I am and how I am walking my process and my life according to this fear that has been haunting me in the back of my mind. In other words, because I fear failing I constantly feel as though I have failed and/or am failing.

However, then I stepped back from this experience and this perception of myself as having 'failed' for a moment, and I looked at the reality of myself and of who I am, who I have been and how I have been walking my process and my life. By doing this, I came to the conclusion that actually in a lot of ways I have transcended many patterns in my mind. I have become an overall more stable and down-to-earth individual. I may not have entirely changed or overcome patterns such as social anxiety, insecurity or self-suppression, but I have already made substantial changes in how I experience myself internally and how I behave, interact and express myself externally.

In conclusion, I realised that within this fear of failing, my mind was creating the perception and the experience that the entire process that I have walked up to this point has been for nought and that I haven't created any change what so ever. And this perception is strange, because it is suggesting that in all this time of having applied the tools of introspection and self-investigation through writing, self-forgiveness and self-commitment I haven't learned anything and I have not in any way expanded or developed myself, while in fact I KNOW that this isn't so. I can physically SEE the changes in myself and in my life - changes that I have created myself over time as I walked my process of self-change.

For quite a while now - and on many occurrences in my process - have I experienced this haunting feeling that I have failed in some way and never have I realized this one simple fact. The fear and even the concept of having 'failed' seemed to just completely override and hide all that I have in fact accomplished and created through the process that I have in fact walked. When the fear of having failed comes up, all that I become in my mind is a 'failure'.

In other words, every bit of potential, success, growth and expansion within myself gets suppressed when the word failure comes up in the mind. Even though there is potential and even though success, growth and expansion has in fact taken place over the years, all of that just disappears completely because all that I am seeing with my minds eye is "failure".

What I am trying to say and show here is that the whole concept of 'failing', at least in the way that it exists at this time, is a mind program. It is a program in the mind because it is not aligned with reality. The fear of failing and the belief that "I have failed" is like a sheet that creeps up in your mind and covers up the reality of who you are. The reality being the gradual learning process that has occurred over time as well as the steps that you have taken to change certain aspects of yourself.

For instance, the reality of myself is that even though at times I may have been more slow in changing a thought/behavioral/emotional pattern and I may have sometimes been stuck in a certain pattern for a while, eventually I did create a change and moved through whatever it was that I was trying to get through. Failure is a mind program because it is a one-dimensional concept that doesn't allow me to see the entire multifaceted reality of who I am in space and time. The mind program of fearing failure is something that will eventually only make me give up on my potential and sabotage my own process of self-expansion and -development simply for the only reason that a fear of failure will block me from seeing any potential for self-expansion within myself. So in a way it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the next blog I will continue looking into the fear of failure and specifically into what the solution is to changing the pattern of fearing failure.