Fear of Failure

So about a month ago, I decided to do a bit of research into my life. There was something stopping me from progressing in life. While I was quite smart, my peers were overlapping me in many ways. They were picking up coding really fast, they were getting bigger pay rises, they were all excelling in things. We all started at the same time, but what exactly was it they were doing that I wasn’t?

Now I know what you’re thinking - everyone learns at their own pace. And yes that is incredibly true. The thing is, I’m a bit ashamed sometimes to tell people what I graduated in. This isn’t because I am ashamed of where it came from, it’s because I’m ashamed that I “can’t do it”. You heard me right guys… I graduated from a degree in software applications development, and can’t code.

That’s right… can’t code
Or should that be “can’t code”

Notice the difference? That’s because one of them is slightly in a better mind frame with the quotations. There’s a difference between I can’t and I’m still learning it. The thing is though, I’ve been learning it for the last 5 years and still can’t really pick it up well. Proper enterprise coding and coding that’s done to the high level like what I’ve seen, is just insanity.

Having the level of skill to tackle it is a different story altogether. I want to be able to tackle it and want to be able to understand the ins and outs of what I’m doing and how I’m making it happen… there’s just one small thing standing in the way.

I have a fear of failure. Quite a bad one too.

I’m not saying it’s to the extent of atychiphobia but more to the extent of it can prevent me from doing something. It also seems to wedge into the perfectionism, which I’ve had since I was a child. Most of these things stem from childhood etc.

So what does it feel like to me? Let’s dive a bit into the mentally taxing part. It’s always been quite hard for me to admit that I don’t know something or don’t understand it. That’s because I don’t want to look stupid. I really don’t want to let my guard down. I know what some of you are thinking, wouldn’t you look stupider if you said you knew it but didn’t… truth is - you are 100% right.

See the symptoms of this can be a few things:

• You start and never finish something because you’re afraid it’s not right or perfect
• You’ll often procrastinate on stuff
• You’ll come to a stopping point and either give up and not carry on, or procrastinate on the task - pushing to the back burner
• Then you feel anxious that you might be found out that you can’t accomplish the task
• This can then lead to a sense of imposter syndrome and you battling out whether it’s syndrome or the truth, which also leads you to have a long hard think about whether this is right for you or not.

When did it start?

See my first coding job, and the first job I had straight out of Uni wasn’t great. The team weren’t very great at helping juniors, they also weren’t very great at being mentors. There was one person who was great at doing it, however they had other sights in their mind. This isn’t inherently their fault, we’re all busy, I think it’s mostly because there was one individual who took me aside and gave me the grilling of a lifetime. It was so bad it mad me feel absolutely worthless… ever since then I was afraid to try to code. I was in fear of doing it wrong or that it wouldn’t meet expectations…

Pretty much I froze… in the middle of doing jobs, I froze.

It didn’t get much better with other jobs, however once I got to my now job, I think it got slightly better… that is until I got a new manager that came from the same company and had the same managerial background as the last guy. That knocked my confidence once again. And we were back to where we started.

It wasn’t really until February 2021 that I decided something else was wrong… I was sick and tired of being afraid of unknown and etc… so I decided to do something about it.

How did this happen?

Let’s start by pin pointing a few things as to how I got here. I had just arrived back home after living by myself for 10 years. I felt like a child again in my house… back to the same wonderful fuzzy feel, and that I had less to worry about. There was however still one problem in the back of my head, and it’s a rather substantial problem…

I wasn’t really that good at my job. There were new graduates coming in overlapping me, and I’m pretty much left behind thinking what am I doing with my life… am I in the right job??

I wasn’t satisfied with things, so I started searching on Google. What I was feeling at the time was more in the direction that my job was bringing me down… and that’s exactly what I searched. I came across this article that said it could be a fear of failure and the points it mentioned were 100% bang on.

I searched that up… and that’s how I got here. I had a fear of failure. A strong one as well.

So to go back to the top, in the 10 years I’ve lived by myself, I had always been self sufficient, however that self sufficiency was met by a healthy dosage of a few things…

• What if I ran out of money (happened a few times before)
• What if I get fired from my job (again linked with money)
• What if I fail to provide for my wife (again money)
• What if I have to go back home because I failed… this time not money, but ego

You can sense a common theme here:

Money, ego, toxic masculinity, can’t provide, failure

Growing up, money played a big part of my life. I had pretty well off parents, and it definitely made things easier. Once I went out on my own I only then realised two things:

• Just how responsible you are for many things:
  • Bills
  • Feeding yourself
  • Keeping a roof over your head
  • What you can do for fun vs what you can do to survive
  • How careful you have to be with money

This fed into a big part of the “why do I fear failure” part of things. I wanted to be more like my dad and make a wonderful living for my family, however that part came with its own quirks. My dad had way less fear than I did, and I was putting a lot more pressure on myself to succeed, and to prove to myself I wasn’t going to fall flat on my face.

what am I doing to tackle this

So we found out what is wrong with me… what are the next steps. Because of the personality that I have, I love having a solution or cause for things. While I know what I have, solving the fear is going to be a bit more tricky. It starts off with a lot more behavioural issues:

How to break out of this cycle?

Self Love/Gratitude

Now this one is different. Basically you gotta stop putting yourself down and have the confidence to tackle things. Whether you fail or not isn’t that relevant, you must try and keep trying. You need to give everything a go and have it in the mindset of this: I know what doesn’t work now RATHER THAN I failed at this

Make sure you keep a journal or some writing of this

When I need to work out something deep, I journal… that’s exactly how I got here, and that’s exactly how I typed this post. Sometimes writing things down help me a lot, it can help you notice some patterns in things.

For the next few days, we’re gonna do an exercise to keep your feelings in track:

• Write down the highs/lows of everyday. It can be as mundane as “that was a nice cup of tea” or “I lost my life savings in GME”. Either way - write it down.
• At the end of the week - write 3 things that you did well this week, and 1 thing that you could do better.
  
  

Now I definitely can’t take the credit for the above bits, I learned this from the brilliant coach Jamie Peacock. Either way, it’s a practice I’ve done for quite a while and helps me work through things and get my mind into a more positive state. In the end, the positive state of mind is what you’re trying to achieve and this is creating a habit out of positivity. Also helps to know if bad things could have been avoided (I.e. traffic crazy on a tuesday).

Try, rather than freeze

This one is much easier said than done, but in my job it’s definitely doable. I freeze whenever I try to code. However because the engineering culture in my job is amazing, it’s not uncommon to pair with someone and just work your way through problems. Do your best to try and make it happen. Do your best to try and work through things.

The most important thing is setting that expectation and using this opportunity to try, and keep trying. In the end, don’t see each try as a failure, but see it as a way of finding out what does/doesn’t work.

Do a fear setting exercise

Tim Ferriss famously did a Ted Talk about fear setting and how it set him up for the 4 hour work week. This is an exercise to help you do damage control in things you may come across before a very big decision.

For my things, in my head, my fear of coding is really a 8-9/10, but in reality it is NOWHERE near that. Doing the fear setting helped me realise that things really aren’t as bad as they are. Yes I’m not great at coding, but I have many other great attributes in life that keep me at my job. It’s been said before to me - tech skills can be taught, soft skills can’t. I excel in the latter than the former, so the fear setting right now is more of a 4, which is attainable. The damage control really is to keep practicing and it will come to me.

Take home, lesson to learn

When you look at the grand scheme of it all, it can be quite silly to fear failure. Well for me it is anyway, I guess if you were mission critical then it’s a very different story overall. Reason why I think it’s silly is because of this:

• My day to day job is supposed to be about failing and making things work through failing
• Nobody is expecting me to be perfect
• I’m at a decent stage of life where I can afford to make mistakes and take risks
• Is anybody going to die if I make a simple mistake in my job? Not for mine. Mine is a decent “failure is encouraged” type environment
  
  

The only thing really stopping me, is this: EGO. Yes you heard it folks, I have quite a fragile ego. Being as transparent as I can be in this post I may as well state that I fear failure and have a relatively big ego. Who knows where that stems from, but the point is acknowledging it and making myself improve over the current situation is a big step in conquering both things. Plan to detox your ego, and have a plan to start tackling things.