What is one piece of advice you would give someone who is afraid of failure? Share an experience where you learned from a setback.

Question

Overcoming the fear of failure is a crucial skill for personal and professional growth. This article presents practical strategies gathered from experts to help you transform your relationship with failure. By implementing these tips, readers can develop resilience, improve their approach to challenges, and ultimately achieve greater success.

Jeanette Brown · Answer

My one piece of advice if you're afraid of failure: plan your repair before you start. Write down what you'll do if it flops—who you'll tell, what you'll change, and when you'll try again (within 24 hours). When your brain sees a next step, failure feels less like a verdict and more like feedback.
I learned this launching my first workshop. I launched a "repair literacy" workshop in 2022 expecting twenty seats to go fast. Three people signed up. My stomach dropped, then I opened my repair plan. I called each person, turned it into a white-glove pilot, recorded their questions, and asked what almost kept them from buying. The answer wasn't my content—it was the framing and timing. I rewrote the page to lead with outcomes ("how to fight well without fallout"), moved it to a lunchtime slot, and set an early-bird cap at twelve. Two weeks later, eleven spots filled and the feedback sharpened the curriculum I still use today. The fear didn't disappear — it just had a map.

Dr Barbara Eaton · Answer

After coaching hundreds of executives and experiencing my own business pivots over decades, I've learned that fear of failure is actually fear of the wrong kind of difficulty. Most people choose what I call "easy-hard"—avoiding the scary decision now but paying for it with regret later.
I had an experience years ago during a live event when my keynote speaker got completely lost and was missing right before his talk. Instead of panicking about the "failure" of a ruined event, I chose "hard-easy"—I jumped on stage unprepared and delivered an impromptu session myself. The room remained electric, and when he finally arrived, the audience was perfectly primed.
That experience taught me the framework I now teach: you don't get to avoid hard situations; you only get to choose which kind. The failure you're afraid of is usually just your brain's Reticular Activating System (RAS) filtering for danger instead of opportunity.
My advice: write down the question looping in your head about that failure, then reframe it. Instead of "What if I fail?" ask "What would success require from me today?" Your brain will literally start noticing different possibilities once you change the filter.

Miguel Angel Gongora Meza · Answer

The fear of failure becomes less daunting when viewed as practice rather than a final assessment of one's abilities. Early on the Inca Trail, I found the strength of the senior porters to be beyond my capabilities. Some days I carried 15 kg while they carried 25 kg, but I always arrived at camp completely exhausted and embarrassed. In those moments of failure, I could have easily decided to quit. Instead, I observed how the experienced porters packed their loads, matched their footsteps, and leveraged energy savings for the climb. Eventually, I was able to carry the same weight as the seasoned porters and still arrive energetic enough to assist others, which changed my perspective on failure.
Years later, that initial difficulty became the foundation for facilitating groups on their way to Everest Base Camp and Kilimanjaro, where the journey can include more than 60 km of steep elevation gain at high altitude. Even though I'm carrying more than on the Inca Trail and am more fatigued, I am still able to mentally push through. I've learned that failure is not a conclusion; it is a training ground that prepares one's endurance and resilience for greater challenges.

Jeff Bogue · Answer

After 30+ years of pastoral leadership and building Grace Church from one campus to eight across three states, here's what I've learned: failure isn't your enemy--it's your teacher if you let it be.
My biggest setback came early in my leadership when I tried to implement changes too quickly without properly preparing our congregation. We lost several key families, and I questioned everything about my approach. Instead of retreating, I used that failure to develop what became our core leadership principle: "Go first." I realized I had to model vulnerability and admit my mistakes before asking others to trust me with change.
That painful season taught me the power of "practicing self-leadership"--you can't lead others until you can honestly lead yourself through failure. Now when our staff faces setbacks, we don't hide from them. We examine what went wrong, own our part, and use that knowledge to build something stronger.
The church members who stayed through that difficult period became our strongest advocates because they saw authentic leadership in action. Sometimes your greatest ministry comes not from your successes, but from how you handle your failures in front of others.

Ben Schwencke · Answer

The most important way to address the fear of failure is to decouple failure from self-esteem.
Attribution theory holds that people attribute failure either internally or externally, i.e., blame themselves or the external situation.
For example, if you fail a test, you could accuse yourself of not being smart, or you could say that the test itself was too hard.
Research shows that attributing failures internally erodes self-esteem, making people more risk-averse and afraid of failure.
External attributions, however, do not impact self-esteem and instead protect motivation moving forward.
Realistically, failure is almost always due to both internal and external factors, but you are well advised to focus on the external factors first, especially if your instinct is to blame immutable characteristics (intelligence, personality, physical characteristics, etc.).
For example, whenever large deals with clients fall through, I step back and take stock of what happened. I remind myself that the majority of deals fail, and that's a more likely outcome than success. From there, I take an honest accounting of everything that went wrong and look to learn from the experience.
I don't beat myself up or put myself down, and I certainly don't avoid trying again. Instead, I rationalize what happened, acknowledge that many factors led to the failure, and don't allow setbacks to erode my self-esteem, making failure seem less intimidating.

Janice Kuz · Answer

Having run cafes for 20+ years and launched The Nines nearly a decade ago, I've learned that failure isn't the enemy--indecision is. When we opened, I was terrified we'd picked the wrong location or that Maroochydore wasn't ready for our Melbourne-inspired vibe.
Our biggest setback hit around year three when we tried expanding our dinner service. We invested heavily in new equipment and evening staff, but it flopped spectacularly--we were barely covering costs after 6 PM. Instead of panicking, I pulled the plug within six weeks and redirected that energy into perfecting our all-day breakfast and lunch offerings.
That "failure" actually saved us thousands and taught me to trust our core strengths. We doubled down on what worked--our Bacon Benny became non-negotiable, we perfected our coffee with Tim Adams' Vintage Black blend, and focused on being the best daytime spot on the Coast.
My advice: set a failure deadline before you start anything new. Give yourself permission to quit fast if something isn't working, then pour that saved energy into what's already bringing you joy and profit. Our monthly specials program came from this mindset--small experiments that either stick or disappear within 30 days.

Carlos Nasillo · Answer

If you're risk-averse and failure scares you, view failure at tech-driven businesses as a way to gather and analyze data. My education as a software engineer showed me that a slight reduction in our expectations is not the same as complete failure. However, my software engineering background taught me how to treat failure not as a matter of flawed design that has invalidated our whole project, but as bugs to debug.
When our booking platform crashed in the middle of peak season travel in Southeast Asia, leading to a 40% revenue loss over three weeks, I had an initial freakout. Instead, I redefined it as a systems analysis issue. I treated the failure as a debugging session, determined the root causes, and improved error handling. Rather than let the lost revenue get me down, I studied the crash data to better understand traffic, server capacity, and user behavior.
The failure surfaced architectural weaknesses that we would not have otherwise discovered, and we were motivated to re-write our booking system to be more scalable and monitorable. This allowed us to address 30% more web traffic and decrease booking mistakes by 60%. In the end, the failure gave us greater insights on how customers behave over time and how to optimize than an entire year of success could have. Failure tells you more about wrong assumptions and what to fix than success does.

Nicola Leiper · Answer

I am a person who has built a translation business from zero revenue to seven figures. What I tell every entrepreneur gripped by perfection is that winners ship good work on time, while perfectionists polish themselves out of business. Fear of failure is the biggest killer of companies. I learned this lesson when my perfectionism cost me a contract of $45,000 from a German automotive company. While I was spending three weeks agonizing over a single technical term in a 50,000-word document, my competitor delivered their version with 99.8% accuracy and won the deal. My obsession with an extra 0.17% accuracy cost me the quarter's revenue.
That failure was my moment of breakthrough. I have a two-hour rule: if there is a terminology argument, it's brought up to the client immediately. This one adjustment increased project completion rate from 87% to 98% and reduced delivery times by four days. My teams' projects are now completed 15% faster because they know the limits of perfectionism. I lost one German client that came back to me two years later because the other agencies couldn't keep up with us in terms of speed. Sometimes your greatest weakness turns out to be your greatest strength.

Joe Davies · Answer

I would say the best way to face failure is to expect it and use it to sharpen your approach. In the early days of FATJOE, we rolled out a service package that didn't gain traction, and the silence from clients was humbling. That experience reminded me that testing, listening, and adjusting are much more valuable than trying to be perfect upfront.

Nicolas Breedlove · Answer

Treat fear of failure as missing data. The question is whether the risk is related to safety, budget, or community impact. I slow down and run a test before I scale.
We once rushed a new climber installation and missed a surface depth check. The safety audit flagged a fall height variance of two inches. We paused, ran a pilot at one school, and added a daily torque check and a pre-pour depth gauge. Within a month, rework decreased by 40 percent. Fear loses power when you turn it into a checklist, a pilot, and a postmortem.

Ansh Arora · Answer

Failures are a part of growth. You learn from the things dragging you down and grow flawlessly. Getting up from a setback is never easy, but it makes you stronger emotionally. The only way to achieve something is to make it happen. Despite your best efforts, sometimes some things just don't work. Going back to those things and identifying spots where you missed it is all you need.
Recently, I have been working on locking a deal, but despite my best efforts, the deal fell through. It was devastating at first, but then, after a little breakdown and some arguments with myself, I started revisiting every checkpoint, reexamining where I missed something or what went wrong.
At first, it was overwhelming. But slowly it started sinking in. A few nights of recalculating, reviewing every negotiation, and deep diving into every detail, I found the glitches. There was a calculation not taken into account, which would have made for an incredible negotiation, and we missed it. Of course, as per everyone's opinion, it was a lost cause, but willingness never fails you.
I replanned everything and mentioned it all again, redrafting the points. I shared it with the client anyway. They couldn't give us that project, but we got a reference for future retainership, and the revenue for the same was way more than the one we missed.

Arsen Misakyan · Answer

To anyone who is afraid of failures, I'd say it's like a tuition bill for school: you're paying the price for learning something that you can't otherwise learn. I over-committed to one event at Angel City Limo, where we had way more cars than drivers at the very beginning. It was insane, and I stayed up half the night making breakthroughs to fill in gaps.
The setback caused me to re-imagine how we scheduled, staffed, and engineered our backup systems. We discarded vendor relationships and planning processes that had allowed us to begin thinking even bigger long-term. In hindsight, I came to recognize that the struggle taught me more about scaling than any success ever could have.

Juan Cava · Answer

One piece of advice I'd give is to see failure as a step in the process, not the end of it. Early on, I misjudged a property's repair costs and lost money, but that mistake forced me to create a much stronger system for calculating offers. I'll put it this way: what felt like a big setback at the time now prevents much larger mistakes today.

Michael Pedrotti · Answer

I am a person who turns server catastrophes into tournament victories. The fear of failure can end your career as a host even before it begins. The best moment of my life was when we participated in a Counter-Strike tournament with 64 teams and a prize fund of $5,000, and our main server experienced a 30 percent packet loss in the semifinals.
The majority of admins would have reset the entire bracket, ruining six hours of player progress. I chose the risky alternative of live-migrating 128 active connections while backing up hardware as matches continued. My team called me crazy. It took 47 seconds of sheer terror before we could complete the migration, but we won the tournament and saved $5,000 in prizes. The lesson from that experience was that nothing can teach me to be an actual server administrator like being thrown into the fire and mastering it, and no manuals would ever teach me to be a great server admin when I'm sitting at my computer studying guides. Today, I practice stress scenarios every month where I simulate the total failure of the entire system, because the difference between amateur and professional hosting is how you respond to a situation where everything in the world is falling apart around you.

Alexander Dodge · Answer

Based on my experience as an executive recruiter, unexpected challenges can arise at any moment when working to fill a role on behalf of an employer. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you learn. Perfection is impossible, so focus on the present and give it your all. In the words of Roger Federer, "When it's behind you, it's behind you... This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point... and the next one after that... with intensity, clarity and focus."

Jonathan Palley · Answer

You've probably heard the saying that failure is the greatest teacher, and there's definitely some truth to it. One of the most important things that failure can teach you is what you're not cut out for. I'm someone whose interests run in many directions. It's one of the reasons that entrepreneurship is such a good fit for me. I have skills that can help me in any industry. However, there are some industries I'm really not cut out for. I've tried and failed to launch restaurants, delivery services, and 3D printing farms, and all of those failures helped me to zero in on what I'm best at.

Anna Zhang · Answer

Treat fear as a cue to shrink the risk and speed the feedback loop. The first thing I check is whether the goal is learning or scaling. I watch channel fatigue. If it's about learning, I can spend time defining a success metric and timeboxing the test.
A holiday campaign once missed badly after we chased an influencer drop. CTR was soft, and ROAS fell below 1.2. We reset to a 70-20-10 budget split across search and creators, and ran two-day AB tests on hooks and thumbnails. After two cycles, ROAS passed 2, and the playbook stuck.

Clayton Eidson · Answer

At times, failure can be difficult, but it can also be one of the most impactful elements of development. In addition, I have come to discover that the fear of failure typically detracts from your development more than failure itself. Once you enter into the challenge, expecting not to have success, you stop seeing it as evidence of your incompetence, and instead start seeing it as a lesson to make you sharper.
What I still have in mind is the power this situation brings. It isn't simply that you gained something; you gain strength, insight, and the clarity of what's really important. You can't quit until you have given failure a shot and obtained evidence that you have made it. The individuals who are successful are not those who have never failed; they are the individuals who kept going, improved their tactics, and kept coming back stronger.

18 Tips for Overcoming Fear of Failure

Table of Contents

18 Tips for Overcoming Fear of Failure

Plan Your Repair Before Starting

Choose Hard-Easy Over Easy-Hard

View Failure as Practice for Growth

Practice Self-Leadership Through Setbacks

Decouple Failure from Self-Esteem

Set a Failure Deadline for New Ventures

Treat Failures as Debugging Opportunities

Prioritize Shipping Over Perfection

Turn Fear into Actionable Checklists

Learn from Setbacks to Improve Strategy

See Failures as Tuition for Learning

View Setbacks as System Improvement Chances

Face Challenges to Master Your Craft

Focus on the Present Moment

Use Failure to Refine Your Direction

Shrink Risks and Speed Up Feedback

Expect Failure to Sharpen Your Skills

Embrace Failure as a Growth Opportunity

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