Fear of Failure Holds Us All Back Naturally and Automatically
We are hardwired to be creatures of habit. Our reticular activating system is always scanning the horizon looking for danger. This creates the bubble of safety we call our comfort zone.
As doctors, we have a number of comfort zones. Your personal comfort zone when you're away from work is one. At work, you have a comfort zone inside the boundaries of your specialty - the things you're comfortable doing with patients and the things you aren't (many of which are due to previous bad outcomes).
In order to keep us safe, we have a cognitive bias against doing anything new. We stay inside the protective walls of our personal comfort zone at work and at home.
The boundary guard of our comfort zone is fear of failure.
If we do something new it might not work out the way we planned.
We've learned to understand that as FAILURE, and avoid it at all costs
At the same time, all of us are constantly reaching for new goals and learning new skills. Check that ... All of us aspire to reach new goals and learn new skills.
Fear of failure can bring any outside-the-comfort-zone excursion to a screeching halt.
Things might not work out the way we planned. It's risky. I haven't got time for that. So ... we default to just getting busy again.
And as a doctor, you can always find something to get busy with. The Whirlwind is complicit in reinforcing the walls of our comfort zone.
In this post, you'll discover a way to redefine failure, to eliminate it completely from your vocabulary and your life experience at work and at home. It's a very simple mental exercise for scientists like you and me.
You see ... anytime you do something new, it's just another experiment - like the ones we did as undergrads. Let me show you how this mind flip works so you can stretch your boundaries, learn new skills, reach new goals and enjoy the ride.
Check it out.
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The perception of failure is a very powerful learning device for all humans. We look back on things that we tried that didn't work out the way we planned and we see those things as FAILURE.
And I want you to know that this safety-first segment of your personality is making an error in judgment that stunts our personal and professional growth.
Let's eliminate failure from your thought process as you plan to do new things and build new skills—show you how failure gets in the way of your learning, and reprogram this whole concept so that you can smoothly move towards your goals and acquire the skills you need along the way. Check it out.
Why Physicians Struggle With Trying New Things
Physicians struggle with fear of failure even more so than non-physicians. It's because we live in a high risk environment. "Failure" in a healthcare setting can have life-threatening consequences. The ability to get the right answer every single time is fantastically important—especially when you're seeing patients, especially when the stakes are high.
But that programming to avoid failure at all costs bleeds over into the rest of our life in a way that doesn't support our personal or professional development.
Remember Your Roots
- Let's re-examine the whole concept of the word, the idea and the emotion of FAILURE.
- Let's closely examine the relationship between failure and your urge to do something new—to acquire a new skill or to reach a new goal, specifically in your leadership role.
- And let's go ahead and keep our scientist hats on, because what I'd like to do is see taking any new action as an EXPERIMENT
We're all scientists, by the way, remember? Basic science is where most of us started, right?
As a scientist, what do you call the setting where you're trying something new and you don't know what's going to happen?
That's called an Experiment.
And what is the point of experimentation?
>> QUESTION: Is the point of experimentation to get it right, to be able to predict the outcome successfully?
>> NO
>> You always have a hypothesis, but the experiment is to test the validity of the hypothesis.
>> You're not interested in right or wrong
>> You're interested in getting enough data to determine what happened ... in learning something new.
>> So that you can use that LEARNING to take the next step in the right direction.
A Real-Life Example: The Parking Lot Lesson
But that's not how we treat ourselves when we're trying something new. Let's just take a quick leadership example.
Let's say that I taught you how to run better meetings. You run meetings in your department, and you're going to decide to use the parking lot—a flip chart on the wall where people write down discussions that are important but aren't on topic for the meeting. (Note: ALWAYS use a parking lot, but only if you know how to use one)
So you set up a parking lot and tell people about it at the start of your next meeting.
During the meeting, there's a discussion about the call schedule that's important but off-topic. With the group's permission, you have the person who brought it up write it on the parking lot.
At the end of the meeting, that person is upset. Why? Because you didn't say what you were going to do with that parking lot item next. Is that a failure? Did you fail as the first time user of a parking lot? ?
No— you just had a powerful learning experience.
If you had listened closely to my instructions, you would have known that the cardinal sin of a parking lot is abandoning things in the parking lot - to write them down but failed to address them at the end of the meeting.
People won't let you park anything ever again if you let it die in the parking lot.
You just forgot that part of the lesson, had a powerful learning experience and now you’ll never forget it again.
Don’t abandon the parking lot. Don’t call it a failure. Don't listen to any self-talk about how much you suck or you should have never tried the parking lot in the first place.
You got valuable feedback, revised your technique, and improved your leadership.
That’s not failure—it’s growth.
From Failure to Feedback to Growth
Anytime you try anything new - in your personal or professional life - I encourage you to take it on in the spirit of a scientist pushing the boundaries of what you are capable of.
If it doesn’t go the way you planned, it’s not a failure—it’s feedback.
(the more it deviates from what you expected, the more powerful the learning experience)
Growing and learning means you simply must be willing to step outside your comfort zone.
Otherwise, you're stuck in Einstein's insanity trap: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
There is only one way to FAIL:
When you know you need to take a new action
You know what that action is
And you don’t do it.
You sit in the discomfort of your current results, refusing to try.
That is FAILURE - failure to step up.
Use this return to your roots as a scientist to eliminate failure from your lived experience
Once you take action - Any New Action
IF you’re open in mind and spirit to learning
You cannot fail.
Every new step becomes a learning experience.
Coaching Question: What’s Your Next Move?
So coaching point here:
What’s the new action you’ve been putting off?
That thing you know must come next in order to continue your professional and personal growth??
When will you get started—knowing you cannot fail?
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PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT
What's your first/next experiment and what do you hope to learn?