For Fear of Failure

I’ve been thinking about this topic occasionally for the past few months.  Wanting to share it with you is what gave me the idea to start a blog.  You may already be aware of this idea, or be doing it subconsciously, but many are not.  It is a large part of what led me to endurance sport, and is extremely powerful when put into practice…

"Sedit qui timuit ne non succederet"
"For fear of failure, he sat still"
-Horace

When I was a student at SHS, I took Latin.  Our textbook had famous quotes at the top of each page written in Latin on the left, English on the right.  This one stuck with me, but over a decade later I feel like I’m just starting to get the hang of using it.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I could be really good at <insert any skill here>, but…”  How many people do you know that always talk about how good they are at something, but when challenged always have a reason why they can’t compete that day.  How many times have you been guilty of this?  I have done both countless times.  The reasons given are meaningless.  It all comes down to one thing:  fear.

The reason this came to the front of my mind a few months ago was because of the Holiday Hustle 5k run which was held here in Sparta in late November.  When the day drew near, I wasn’t sure if I was going to run it or not.  I found myself coming up with excuses:  “I have other training to do” and “I don’t know if I’ll be back from St. Louis in time.”

In my experience, any time someone has more than one excuse, it is a good indication that they are just grasping for straws and aren’t being completely honest.  That includes me making excuses to myself.  So I started to investigate.  Ask myself questions about what was really going on.

When I dug deeper, I realized that I was scared.  I was afraid that I wouldn’t do well.  Because of training earlier in the day.  Because I’m not in “5k shape.”  I didn’t want friends to think less of my abilities, and more importantly, I didn’t want my cross country athletes to lose faith in my ability to coach them.  If I can’t run a blazing 5k why should they trust me to teach them how to?  

As is often the case, once I got to the root of it, I realized my reservations where a little silly and over exaggerated.  That is when I knew I had to do it because I was scared.  We learn and we grow so much more when we push ourselves outside of our comfort zone. Rarely will we fail as spectacularly as we thought we might, and even if we do, failure is not a bad thing.  It is a learning opportunity.

It is not only choosing to do or not do something though.  There is a more subtle fear that we often fall for.  For those of you that have already run in a  cross country meet, how many people at the starting line have you overheard talking about all the reasons why they aren’t going to run well.  Again, how many times have you done this?  Even after getting myself to the starting line of the Holiday Hustle, I fell prey to this and made sure everyone knew I had already cycled that day and probably wouldn’t run well.  The battle against our fears never ends.

The problem with this is that we are giving ourselves an easy way out if things aren’t going well.  We allow ourselves to back off.  An example from running that happens all the time:  Rather than pushing harder into a pace you are afraid you can’t maintain to catch up to someone in front of you, you maintain a comfortable distance back.  It is a scary thought to imagine giving it everything you’ve got and coming up short.  But if you are brave enough to risk it, I promise it will pay off.  Physically and mentally you will make breakthroughs.  

So all this inspirational mumbo jumbo is great, but what do we actually need to do?  Simply, do the things that scare you.  Not everything that scares you of course.  I’m scared of jumping out of a plane without a parachute and I won’t be doing that any time soon.  Use your brain a little.  But the things that make you nervous; something you might not normally do but could be good for you or fun; when you know you are making cheap excuses; embrace the fear and go for it.

Even to write this post I had to battle this fear.  And I hope that little by little it makes me a better writer, and allows me to better help you achieve your goals.

I could go on and on about this.  So if you want to discuss further, leave a comment below.  I would really like for this to be a group discussion rather than just me talking.  On the current platform, I’m not able to make “name” un-required for comments, but just write anonymous or use a screen name if you don’t want to use your own name.  Or if you would rather keep it private, send me an email.