In this post: Do you let the fear of failure hold you back from getting in the game to go after what you want? You’re not alone! To help you overcome the fear of failure, I’m sharing a concept that I teach to my UPswing Mastermind students along with 4 tips to overcome the fear of failure.
Watch this post by clicking the image below or keep scrolling to read
(This video is hosted in the Healthy Wealthy Society, a free group for health coaches & wellness entrepreneurs. If you have trouble accessing this video, you may need to join the group first.)
How To Overcome The Fear Of Failure
Today I want to talk about the fear of failure. Maybe you're just starting in your health coaching or wellness business, and you're already worrying from day one. Perhaps you’re thinking “what if this doesn't work?”
Or perhaps you've already been training clients for a while and aren't getting the success you want. So now maybe you're starting to feel like you're a failure.
But I'm going to propose a concept that, if you are not failing, you're not trying hard enough.
This is a concept that I teach in my UPswing Mastermind, which is my signature program for health coaches - that there is positive and negative in everything in the universe. There’s yin and yang in everything.
Often as women, we feel that everything has to be perfect, and if it’s not, it's bad. We tend to see it in black and white and, if we’re not perfect, we beat ourselves up and decide that it's wrong, bad, shameful and we’re a failure.
But this isn’t reality and this type of thinking doesn’t help us to get clients.
A great metaphor that I like to pass on to people who are starting out, is that in the beginning, it’s a bit like you're a stone starting to roll down a hill. It takes a while to pick up momentum as it starts going down the hill, and it might even hit a few speed bumps and go off course, but once it's going, it's going. You've got to be willing to be a beginner and have a few failures and a few stumbles at the start. In fact, you have got to get used to that the whole way through running a business.
So in my business, I have a lot of wins. I've supported over 800 new health coaches now to get their businesses started and I've had a lot of financial success and business success in that way. But there's also a lot of failures because what you need to see is that for all the goods, there have to be all the bads, it’s like that is a universal law.
And sometimes, things that could feel like failures at the time turn out to be such a gift of learning.
For example, I had a tech issue right in the middle of a webinar during the launch of my UPswing Mastermind - we had 4 or 5 hundred people on the webinar and it was my one launch for the year. At the time, it felt like a failure and I could have easily let that bring up all kinds of stories and even walked away from the business. Instead, it led me to work out how to sell UPswing Mastermind in different ways.
My failures have really been what's taught me what I know now.
I'm not saying you have to fail, what I’m asking you to do is to not be afraid to fail and to accept that failure is natural and normal. Being afraid to fail ultimately holds you back from being able to succeed because it keeps you from taking action.
It can be hard to embrace the idea of failure, but I have a few tips I’d like to share about how you can learn to be less afraid of it.
1. Don’t believe the hype that you see online
There's good and bad in everything and you need to focus on your own game.
Being an entrepreneur is not a race and as entrepreneurs, we get swamped with information about other people's successful businesses and big launches.
Although it can be inspiring to follow other people’s wins and successes, you can get caught up in accidentally comparing yourself and deciding that you are a failure before you have even tried to succeed.
A lot of what we see online is smoke and mirrors, too. The people who appear to be doing well may not be at all. You can’t see their foundations and the things that really make them successful.
2. Take the stairs, not the escalator
There’s a concept I teach about taking the stairs, not the escalator. We all know that stairs are hard work and escalators are easy and do the hard work for us.
I see taking the escalator as trying to grab a quick win or a quick fix to a solution rather than treating each step as a milestone and an achievement.
For those who take the escalator and then have a stumble, all they do is get back on the escalator trying to find the quickest way to the top. Those who take a stumble on the stairs fall back onto the foundations that they have built up over time.
3. If you're not failing forward, you're not trying hard enough
I like to think of failure not as a step backwards, but as failing forward. It’s a stumble, but it’s a stumble in the right direction.
Failing forward is not about burning yourself out and forcing yourself to try harder, it’s about stretching yourself to reach the next level. The way I like to look at it is a yoga stretch – it’s nice and gentle but provides a sense of achievement.
Think about what your next leap is and if it’s going to take you out of your comfort zone. If you want to go there, there's going to be a stretch. If something is too easy and you're playing it safe out of fear of failure, then you aren't stretching in the right way or stretching enough.
I always encourage clients to stay connected to their personal ‘why’ and why they want to make the stretch for themselves, for their clients and for the world.
If we can find our ‘why’ and what we are connected to then we're willing to fail forward in every new level of business, even if you're just going from ‘never done it before’ to ‘getting started as a health coach journey’, it does require risk-taking.
4. Be prepared to take risks
I don't think you can go to a new level without some level of risk-taking. And when you do that, there's a certain aspect of your identity that shifts a little bit. Shifting of course means changing and change can be scary.
The bigger your success, the bigger the failures, and this is linked to risk and reward, and you need to constantly ask yourself: how much are you willing to risk in order to gain that huge reward?
If you're familiar with my teachings, you will know I often refer to the ‘5k a month woman’, and if you are striving to become this woman then your identity is going to shift in how you look at yourself and how you perceive the world.
Again, it’s the thinking about change that can be scary. We're often more scared of our success than we are of failure, but to be able to achieve success you must also accept that failure is part of it.
Related Post: Why Failure Is A Necessary Part Of Success As A Coach
The mind can never control what failures will present in life and it is important to remember that failure is not the opposite of success. It is just a part of it.
If we're scared and we're trying to play on the sidelines, then we're never in the game of life. We fail by default because we didn’t even get in the game properly in the first place.
Being scared of failure can lead to shortcuts, which can in turn, lead to further failure. You need to factor failure into your plan so that you are not surprised by it when it inevitably happens.
We have to be brave. We have to be courageous. Especially if we're going to get our work out there into the world. So don't be afraid to ask for help, from mentors, from peers, from your community. You need people around you.
This is why I only mentor people in groups, like in my UPswing Mastermind community, because we feel loved and safe. Not for whether we succeeded or whether we fail, but because we are in a community and we don't start making our business wins, or losses be a reflection on whether we are a winner or loser.
Think about an action that you need to take that could help you to begin your next step, whether it's the first step of your health coaching business or the 10th step. Lean into it and let the climb to the top begin!
Love,
Amanda xx
P.S. Want to learn how to boost your coaching confidence so you feel like a PRO and get MASSIVE results? Click this link to get instant access to my FREE resource on Coaching Confidence >> https://training.amandajdaley.com/coachingconfidence/
Did you find this post helpful? Please share it with your friends by pinning the image below!
