Why fear of failure can cause failure

Question: My brother is 38 years old and very intelligent and capable. But anything he tries to do ends in failure. He has now abandoned himself and doesn’t want to risk trying anything new. He lives as a modest employee when he has capacity for much more. (JS, from Chacabuco)

We all have fears of different things and one of them is the fear of failure. To avoid this and not try to search for what you want, it is common to withdraw into oneself and avoid taking risks in achieving certain projects.

The fear of failure, like most fears, It is an unreal illusion resulting from an anticipation of a negative result faced with an event that, although it has not happened yet, the individual feels as if it were happening in the present and that paralyzes him.

Many researches showed that The main factor that causes failure is precisely the fear of failure.

Faced with this possibility, when going to undertake a certain project, the subject focuses his concern on the problems or possible threats of failure, thus consuming a good part of his thoughts and energy that he should better dedicate to the execution of the process in question. in order to obtain an adequate result.

That is, worry and negative anticipation consume more energy than you should dedicate to the relevant actions you should take.

René Laforgue, psychoanalyst, studied the concept of failure neurosis to designate the psychological structure of a whole range of Individuals that, in general, ranges from those who seem to be the architects of their own failure, to others who cannot bear to achieve what they seem to ardently desire.

Fear of failure often causes failure.

Although it is also valid to point out other possible reasons:

1) The fear of success, due to the increase in responsibility that would entail and that one does not want to face.

2) The blamefor feeling that he does not deserve success because he has a low concept of himself, thus placing himself in the necessary position to fail.

3) The resentmentas a kind of revenge on those who pressure him or pressure him to succeed, without considering that they themselves are the ones who end up damaged.

Many consider error and failure to be very valuable to move forward since we all learn and become adults after applying the system of trial and error countless times.

In this frame, There are two types of personalities with a frequent tendency to fail. or feel like failures.

On the one hand, those who have low self-esteem and a poor self-image, which is why nothing they achieve is important to them and almost everything seems like a defeat to them.

The others who frequently feel like failures are perfectionists, as they always have the bitter taste that things could have turned out better.

So, They live with the feeling that their life is a permanent unfinished workfull of imperfections and inappropriate for those who aspire to perfection.

It’s healthy then claim the right to failure (and instill it from childhood) as a basic right and necessary to progress.

In reality, it is one more element of life and it is useful to integrate it as something natural, inherent to the human condition.