Fear Of Failure

Fear of failure is an emotional sickness that causes some people to recoil from goals that, if reached, would be to their advantage. This anticipation of inability to achieve often characterizes gifted and highly sensitive persons. The fear of failure robs them of self-esteem and becomes more entrenched with each defeat.

Success engenders more success, but the thwarting of one's efforts by fear of failure tends to further disappointments. Fear of failure stifles the power to perform. The person is stripped of his defenses and overwhelmed with a sense of inadequacy. This destructive fear of failure can practically immobilize a student confronting a difficult examination. A budding young lawyer fails the bar exam as facts are suddenly frozen in his memory.

Perhaps even the newborn infant is subject to fear that he may not survive in a hostile world, now deprived of the warmth and life-sustaining nourishment provided by the mother's body. Perhaps, although thought processes are meager at this time, the neonate cries out instinctively against the possibility of nonexistence, the impossibility of returning to the womb.

However, one does not need speculative concepts to realize the importance of the fear of failure. It is one of the great influences, molding one's personality and dogging one's footsteps consciously or subconsciously during one's lifetime. The fear may be so subtle that the person is hardly aware of it, or it may be shattering enough to wreck a career.

The developmental process of fear of failure is complicated, but nevertheless understandable. It starts with the causative factor of all emotional disorders: frustration, the deprivation or denial of things necessary for the welfare of the individual. It begins with unmet needs, unsatisfied psychological nourishment for the soul, stifling factors that hinder the natural development of emotional health.

Environments that predispose a person to fear of failure include a childhood beset by insufficient encouragement, lack of love, and inconsistency of parents so that the child is never sure of those who are supposed to provide support and a sense of security.

The natural reaction of all this negativism is anger. Frustration always arouses hostility and resentment. The child, for example, may make a serious effort to build something beautiful out of his toys, expecting praise, but the mother notices only that he is making a mess in the living room.

Such incidents, multiplied, are detrimental to the child's development of self-confidence; they are examples of unmet needs and subsequent diminution of the ability to tolerate frustration. In the process, he learns the fear of failure. Responding like a laboratory animal, he learns to decrease his ability to cope because of punishment and lack of recognition, leading to a sense of inadequacy which manifests itself into the fear of failure.