How to Let Go Of Your Fear of Mistakes

If you are ready to be more successful in your business and your life, you must update your attitude toward making mistakes and failing. You need to learn how to welcome failure because it’s the key part of the learning process and thus an important step stone to your success. In fact, you’ll find you learn more from messing up than from doing things correctly.

If you’re like me, you’ll find this attitude is not second nature. So how can we embrace this new outlook on mistakes and failure? I have five ideas on how to overcome your fear of making mistakes so that you can grow, take action and succeed.

1. Why do we fear mistakes?

What keeps many of us holding on to our fear of making mistakes is our perceived pressure from others. Maybe you don’t think it’s such a big deal, but you still worry that others will judge or possibly make fun of you.

It could be pressure from others that makes you uneasy about taking risks. If this is true for you, it might help to notice that no one actually judges you (really!). In fact, those around you are more likely to be impressed that you are taking risks, even if you fail.

2. What’s the Worst Thing That Could Happen?

I find it helpful to think about the worst that could possibly happen if I try something and fail miserably. It helps to remove the fear because you realize the worst-case scenario is not so bad when you think about it. Will you ruin your business? How much cash will you lose? Will there be any permanent damage that you can’t undo?  Once you think about the worst thing that could happen, then visualize the best thing that could happen. By comparing these two things, we can see that the potential reward will far outweigh any risk.

3. Shut Up Your Inner Critic

Your inner critic is the voice that speaks to you inside your head that talks you out of things before you even get started. When setting goals, we all want to be realistic, so we hold ourselves back, but your inner critic goes far beyond “realistic” and simply prevents you from taking any action. When you’re about to try something new or take a risk, this inner voice stops you from focusing on any possible mistake you could make, even if the chance is slim.

You can shut up your inner critic by identifying it and calling it out. Learn to recognize when you’re not being realistic but self-defeating. Once you know this is happening, you can remember that succeed or fail, you’ll learn something valuable and ignore your inner critic completely.

4. Hello Mistakes!

If you want to be successful, branch out, and take more action, it will be helpful to realize that you will make mistakes no matter what you do and welcome them with open arms. This is an essential part of success, and you will learn from every mistake and failure.

And always remember that people who seem brave don’t have any more courage than the rest of us. They are afraid and take action anyway. You can do this too.

5. Reframe with Your Thoughts

The language you use is essential in forming how you think about what you do. Learn to reframe things using positive phrases rather than negative, and you’ll find it will change your attitude, as well.

For example, you just launched a product that didn’t sell because you didn’t do your targeting well. Instead of saying you didn’t do it right, reframe it to say, “I need to work more on my targeting next time.” You’re focused on how you can improve rather than how you failed.