How to Overcome the Fear of Making Mistakes

How to Overcome the Fear of Making Mistakes

Nobody is perfect, let’s face the fact. You WILL make mistakes. However, it’s up to you how you react to this. Will you get anxious, even panic, when you notice that you have made a mistake? Will you start being scared and avoid certain situations when you are afraid that you will make a mistake which will lead to the ultimate horror: making fool of yourself (there is a fancy name for this phobia: atychiphobia, don’t ask me how to pronounce it!)

Or, will you just continue without caring less, not giving the failure even a second thought?

Believe or not, the choice is yours. Yes, YOU can choose your feelings. You can choose your reaction. You have the free will to decide what is your response on that moment when you make that mistake.

I admit learning to choose your feelings and reactions is not easy. You might want to try guaranteed-to-help holistic methods to beat your anxiety and panic attacks, or anything that you feel resonates with you, be it supplements for anxiety or even homeopathy.

How to overcome the fear of making mistakes

Fear of making mistakes can really paralyze you. You feel your heart is beating fast and your blood pressure rises. Maybe your hands are sweating or you get other symptoms of anxiety attack, even pain. Ultimately, the fear can keep you from developing and nurturing essential relationships. It can limit your work and career, and it can create cognitive stress and anxiety that lead to physical problems. So, how do you overcome the fear of making mistakes? The following psychological practices and tips are proven to help you deal with your fear of failure, and move quickly past it.

Realize that you are going to make mistakes

We as human beings are imperfect in many different ways. And because we are imperfect, we make mistakes. However, without trying to accomplish things we aren’t sure that we can achieve, our growth is curbed. We need to make mistakes to be able to grow. Some of the most remarkable inventions are initially mistakes, so you can never be sure how positive thing your mistake will turn in the end. Keep that in mind and it will help you cope with making mistakes and move past it. Think of a mistake you made a year ago, or five or ten years ago. Doesn’t it feel unimportant now? Your life didn’t end, just the opposite, you got a chance to grow. Be thankful of those mistakes, they make you a better person!

Understand that nobody really cares

The main reason why people are so afraid of making mistakes is because of being frightened what others will think about them. The truth is — consider it as a good or bad thing — that the world is not centered around you. Your mistakes are your own mistakes, nobody else’s mistakes. Believe or not, the world is not waiting for you to make a mistake so they can laugh at you (and if they are, it’s a sign of their flaw, not yours, and they are the ones who are in a serious need for therapy as no healthy and sound people do that). In most cases, nobody notices your mistake, or is concerned about your failure but yourself, so just calm down and be like nothing happened. Who cares if you fail? People do fail all the time.

Failure can lead to the ultimate success

You must have heard that Thomas Edison failed 1,000 times before he invented the light bulb. In school his teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything”. He was fired from his first two jobs because he was non-productive. What if Edison had given into those early mental disappointments and stopped inventing?

Here we see that one of the most important inventions of human history came about because Edison could not care less whether or not he failed or made mistakes. When a reporter once asked him how it felt to fail 1,000 times before he successfully discovered how to harness electricity for light, Edison said, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” Like we talked already in the previous chapter, your mistake might turn into something remarkable and something positive in the end.

The mistake will never lead to the disaster you are afraid of

One of the tasks of the human mind is to protect us. When you think about failing at a certain action, you inevitably dramatize and exaggerate the results of a possible failure and defeat in your mind. This is just a survival instinct that dates back to the caveman days. Failure back then meant getting eaten by a predator, becoming poisoned or starving to death.

Even thousands and thousands of years have passed, we still have that mechanism in our brain nowadays, but for most of us, our survival is fortunately not on the line when we make decisions. Think about the times you’ve failed in the past. Odds are the horrific outcome you had created in your mind was totally overblown. The results of failure are almost never as catastrophic as we anticipate they will be. Understanding that the mistake will never lead to the disastrous results you are afraid of helps overcome the fear of making mistakes.

Conclusion

Making mistakes if part of being human: every single person makes mistakes. Making mistakes help us grow, or even invent something completely new. In any case, we will learn from our mistakes and grow because of them. Making mistakes is not the end of the world; just think that despite how many mistakes you have made, you still are here, stronger and more resilient. There exists nothing why you should be afraid of making mistakes, however if you feel that you cannot overcome the fear all by yourself, try a proven method to curb your anxiety and panic to help you cope and get over the fear of making mistakes. Believe me, it’s worth it!

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