“I have to succeed!”, or the fear of failure

There are moments in your life when you ought to make crucial decisions for your future. Yet, it’s often hard to do it on your own. Because you are afraid.

We frequently tend to focus mostly on our daily tasks and on those things that easily bring satisfaction, although this pattern throws us to the point where we doubt our knowledge and our chances to succeed. What we should always remember is to ask ourselves this rather existential question: who am I, essentially?

I AM WHO I BELIEVE TO BE

In 2006, as I had just begun my formation in coaching, a client (we’ll call him John) gave me a call. He wanted me to help him advance in a personal project. He wished to really believe in himself in six months, when he planned to leave the country.

John was a young professional, with 7 years of experience in sales. He had a secure job in a multinational company, a pretty good income, a car from work. Surprisingly for a salesman, I noticed his introvert side while working with him. He was focusing very much on details and was driven by a sense of justice.

He wanted to leave the country because he felt he was unappreciated by his boss. He dreamed of going in the US and getting a secure job and an easy life, but he was afraid of being rejected. So we started working on “being”: in other words, a personal presentation and positioning as an emigrant.

One of the exercises we developed was to picture himself as he would have arrived there, with every little detail he could imagine, and write all down. This is crucial for those who want to have a clear look on the uncertainties of the future. In writing, the imagination replaces the fear of unknown. John succeeded, after a few sessions, to imagine what the ideal job, the house he wanted and even the lifestyle he wish to develop in the new country would really look like.

This way, he overcame his mental state and deactivated the critical thinking – the so called action killer. At the same time, writing down what you see rewires a part of your unconscious beliefs. So when John put his foot on the American land, six months later, he knew what he had to do.

Yet another challenge was his personal message, a decisive element for the job interview. What he believed to be a handicap (his lack of experience in the American market) was replaced by a sense of opportunity in his new context. Because your personal message defines who you really are and where you see yourself.

THE BIG STEP

At the end of our work, I knew John was ready for his life’s biggest challenge. I was also somehow resonating with him. Maybe the uncertainty I had felt 15 years before, when I myself tried my luck in the US. John’s story is even more special as I was making my first steps in coaching at the time he contracted me. So I was thrilled to receive his call when he found a job there. But the most stirring moment was two years later, when I went there to visit him and saw the house, the yard, the lawn, the barbecue, and all the details he had wrote about.