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The Mindset Mentor
How I Overcame My Fear of Failure
00:16:52
Are you letting your fear of failure keep you from the life you want? Today, I break down why failure isn’t the problem—it’s your fear of judgment. If you’ve been holding yourself back, this episode is for you! Looking for daily motivation? Get free inspirational messages straight to your phone, plus exclusive podcast recommendations and updates on my free workshops so you never miss out. It’s simple: just send "Quotes by Rob" to this link 👉 https://my.community.com/robdial from your phone.
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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. If you're out there and you live in the United States or Canada and you want to get some inspirational Mindset text messages from me directly to your phone, text me right now. 512-580-9305 once again, 512-580-9305 today we're going to be talking about failure and how to overcome failure. Let's get real. One of the biggest roadblocks between you and the life that you want, everything that you want is your fear of screwing up. Your fear, that deep nagging fear of failure. And it's keeping you stuck in some sort of way. And so what does this look like? Maybe you hold yourself back because you don't want to make mistakes and you chase perfectionism, quote, unquote, and say you're a perfectionist, like it's some badge of honor, like you should just be wearing a shirt that says, look at me, I'm a perfectionist. Or maybe you're just scared that somebody will judge you if you mess up. You're scared of other people's opinions. And so you're like, I'm just going to hold myself back because. Cause if I do go out there and do the thing that I want and I do screw up in some sort of way, I'm going to hear people's judgments, I'm going to hear people's opinions, and that makes me feel worse about myself. So I'm just going to stay quiet and stay in the background. Does this sound familiar? I hear it all the time whenever I ask people. And I get on a live and it's a zoom call with 2,000 people. I'm like, what's your number one fear that's holding you back from creating the life that you want? 90% of them at least, is the fear of failure. And they think they're afraid of failing, but they're not afraid of failing. And that's what we're gonna talk about. Here's the whole kicker to all of this. Don't mess it up. That mindset of I don't wanna mess up, I wanna make sure I do it right the first time, whatever it might be, is the worst thing that you can do for yourself in trying to become successful or trying to build an amazing life or trying to bring out your full potential. And I'm going to share a story with you that really changed my mindset on this. A couple years ago, I was working on becoming a pilot and I was getting my pilot's license. And that alone is a journey, right? It's an entire journey. You're going to notice all of your fears, all of your limiting beliefs. And one day, my instructor is named Steven, who's an incredible pilot. He's got like 50,000 hours in a plane. He retired from UPS. He was there for 32 years, he was the head of teaching in UPS and he taught and all of the pilots that came through and safety and all this stuff. And what we do a lot is we practice landings. And so we'll go to an airport and we'll land and then take off, go back in the pattern, land and take off, and we'll do four, five, six, seven at a time. And normally, like, I'm pretty good at it. Like, I'm really good at landing. But one day we flew to a different airport, and the airport was just way different than the other one that I was used to. So it was a shorter Runway. So instead of it being 7,000ft length, this one was only 3,500ft. So 3,500ft was half the distance, like the length of it. It was also narrower. So instead of 100ft wide, it was 34ft wide. So this thing looks completely different in the air looking down than the other one did. And the biggest piece of the whole thing was this airport was built on a hill, meaning that I was not landing flat, I was actually landing uphill. So let me tell you about this. We're coming up to this airport. The approach was good. I lined up the approach. It felt really good. And then we were coming down. And because I wasn't used to just being on a flat landing, and I was used to being on a flat landing, this was uphill. I just, like, botched the landing completely. Like, nothing dangerous, it was just ugly. And, you know, we sue, no big deal. We. We end up taking back off and doing this thing that's called a go round. And a go round just means, hey, we're going to. We're going to go back around and we're going to try it again. And I was kind of pissed because, like, I don't like screwing up. I don't like, quote, unquote, failing. But Stephen, my instructor, he looked at me and he said something that I'll never forget. He said, that was perfect. He's like, you have to screw these up now and then because you need to know what to do when I'm not here. And it was like, for me, it was like a very jarring moment because, you know, botched the landing, had to go around. It's scary. And for him, he was like, no big deal. He's done this so many times. He's like, that was perfect. You have to screw up these landings so that you know what to do. And I'm not here and you can't get a Perfect landing if you haven't had some imperfect landings. And so this is like the golden rule of learning. Like, you have to mess up. And this is why failing is so important. Quote, unquote. Failing is so important for growth, but also to create the life that you want. So let's break this all down. When you make mistakes, I want to actually tell you why this is so important in the actual psychology and the science. Science and the neurology of failure. Okay? Every time you screw up your brain, it releases something that's called epinephrine. And epinephrine is just adrenaline that's inside of your brain. So when you screw something up, when I botch that landing and now I've got to go back around, it releases epinephrine. And this chemical basically is saying, pay attention, buddy. This is really important right now. And so it primes your brain to be even more focused so that your brain can learn faster the next time around. So we do the go around and we come back around in the landing was pretty good after that one, and I was so much more focused and it felt better. And you have to think about this. The reason I've been trying to think about this in my head of, like, why would our brain focus more after screwing up? Why would our brain release epinephrine adrenaline after we screw something up? And I thought about it, I was like, well, maybe if we're in the wild, let's say we're tribal people 200,000 years ago, and you and I are hunting an animal, and we've been tracking this thing for hours, and we haven't eaten in two days, and we miss a shot at that animal. That mistake really matters. And so your body and your brain kick into overdrive. And it's like, hey, we need to get laser focused for this next attempt because it really matters. And we will be right back. Picture this.
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And now back to the show. And so mistakes actually rewire your brain after. You know, for me, like, the one thing that I notice is after every single flight that I have with my flight instructor, I have to drive home with no music on because it's too much. My brain feels like it's really actually repatterning itself. It's. It's way different than driving a car or doing anything else. It's just there's so many other things and it's. My brain's replaying all of the errors and it's adjusting just like it's this mental flight simulator. And every time I go flying with him, the nights, those nights after I sleep like a baby, it's like my brain has to rewire itself in those moments. And so mistakes are really important in these situations. And mistakes are really important for you to, I guess you could say, accept, to beat your perfectionism. Because imperfect action is always better than no action. At all. Most people who are perfectionists are not taking any action towards what is that they want because they're waiting for, quote, unquote, the perfect time. Imperfect, quote unquote, perfect waste time. Messing up is what teaches you how to get better faster. And so why are we so afraid to fail? Like, I really want to call out the elephant in the room here. Why are so many people afraid of failure? Why are we afraid of failure? The elephant in the room is not the fear of failure. It's the fear of judgment. You worry that people will think that you're incompetent. You worry that people are thinking you're going to stupid. You're think that you're stupid. You're worried that people are going to give you their opinions and they're going to shame you and they're going to make fun of you or whatever it might be that you put in your head. You imagine these worst case scenarios that almost never happen. But the truth is, most people are too busy to even pay attention to you. And that's for all of us. Most people are not paying attention to me. They're too busy thinking about themselves to even pay attention to me. They're too busy with their own insecurities. They're too busy thinking about their own failures and things that they're afraid of to even notice us. And so that's why it's important for us to realize that more than anything else, if it's not about us trying to be perfect, it's not about us trying to get away from failure. It's not about us trying to fear failure. It's about us accepting it as like the most important part of success. In my opinion. Like, you cannot have success without failure. You cannot have failure without success. There are two sides to the same coin. And so what can we do to kind of have ourself get a little bit more used to it? Because it's kind of the way I find failure and getting used to failure and getting used to screwing up is that you kind of got to start small. You got to dip your toes in the water. And so what I would recommend is like, fail small. Pick something like really low stakes and just screw it up on purpose and realize it's not that big of a deal. Try a new hobby, you know, go pick up basketball and look like an idiot and then go to a gym that you've never been to before and you'll never go again. You'll never see those people ever again in your entire life. Go play pickleball. At some place you've never been to and look like an idiot. And then you'll never see them ever again as well. Who cares? Go screw it up. Test something that you're curious about. And then what I want you to do is I want you to start thinking about reframing mistakes as. Instead of them being failures as being data. The only time you actually fail, in my opinion, is when you give up on something. And so if you see a mistake, that's just a data point. So instead of seeing failure as, you know, a mistake as failure, I guess you could say, use it as this reflection of. This is information for me. Like, this is information that I need. I need to know how to not do something in order to learn how to do something. And so with each time that you have a mistake, you just need to ask yourself, what can I learn from this? So in that situation where I just completely botched the landing, why don't I look at that and go, okay, what did I screw up? And then, you know, while I'm going around the pattern, he'll say, hey, this is what happened here. This is what happened here. You needed to pull your. The throttle earlier. You need to make sure that you're pulling. Pulling the throttle earlier so that you're. You're kind of stalling at. Right above the ground. But then also you gotta make sure that you're pulling back on the yoke so that therefore, you know, you're not just gonna slam into the ground. You gotta kind of let. It's an interesting thing that people don't realize about. About landing a plane. You just kind of let the plane fall out of the sky. You just got to get better at making it fall better, I guess you could say. And you got to get comfortable with allowing yourself to screw up into. Sometimes you need a second try, Sometimes you need a third try. It's not failure, it's recalibrating. And that's what's really important. So you have to understand, it's not just failure, it's recalibrating. And there's one really big difference that I've noticed as I've gotten older and people that I've hung around. There's a big difference between people who are just kind of like average people in life. Well, there's nothing wrong with, but they just have average lives or people who hold themselves back in many ways versus people who are, I guess you could say, massively influential in this world. People who you might look up to and people who might have lives that you want successful business people, successful athletes, successful actors, actresses, philanthropists, whatever they might be. The one thing that I've learned from really, really successful people in many aspects of success, whether they're friends, mentors, people that have been watching from afar, is that the most successful people don't try to avoid failure. They try to go head first at failure. It's not that they try to avoid it at all. It's that they try to fail as fast as possible. And that's not like a, hey, I'm just going to tell you something motivational. Like I've seen. People are like, I'm, I want to screw up as much as I possibly can. And they fail as often as they possibly can because they realize with every single failure that they have, they're finding the route that doesn't get them to where they want to go. And they will then get to their success that they've been looking for even faster. And so I want you to think about this, because I talk about failure a lot with, you know, different groups that I coach and zooms that all run. And when I speak on stages and stuff, you can look like if you're in a marriage right now, I'm married. I've been with my wife for 11 years now. I can look back at all of my past relationships before my wife, and I can say all of those relationships were fails. Like, I failed in all those relationships. We failed. There are failed relationships, but I don't see them that way. All of them gave me knowledge that I needed to know what I wanted in a relationship, but also know what I didn't want a relationship and also know how I should be and how I shouldn't be in a relationship. So those weren't failed relationships. They were relationships that prepped me for the current relationship that I'm in. So I can't look at those as failures, and I don't look at any of them as failures. They're just relationships that I had prior to my wife. I can also look at business as well. Like, now I have a business that is the most successful business I've ever had, and we have 40 employees and we're doing great, we're growing and we're hiring, and all of that is amazing. Before, though, I've had multiple failed businesses, quote, unquote, failed businesses. But I can look at them and be like, yeah, I screwed up those businesses and I was so bad and all that. But really what I do is I like to look at those businesses and say, I could not have the business that I have now unless I failed at business number one and in business number two, I could not be the leader that I have now without having, you know, quote unquote, failed at business number one and business number two before then. It gave me the knowledge, both of those, the relationships, the businesses. Everything I've done before in the past has given me the knowledge that I needed to, to become better in the future. And so it's really important to, to understand this is that with every single mistake that we have, we've got to ask ourselves, how can I learn from this? We can't be afraid of failing. We can't be afraid of other people's opinions. We can't be afraid of that. And this is one of the things that I've really made a big difference with in my coaching and my training. You know, I train a lot of people who are coaches and growing their online coaching businesses. I use this in my business all the time. I tell my students the very first video that they watch when they join my program is the very first thing that I talk about is like the commandments of growing an online coaching business. And number one, is it up and figure it out. I, I take that approach in business, I take that approach in life. I take that approach in everything that I do. And it was really cool to go up in a plane with my, my, my flight instructor and for him to be like, you have to mess up because that's the only way that you're going to get better. And I say this to people all the time. And I think it's really important for you to understand as well. If you're afraid of failure, if you're trying to avoid failure, you will not get the life that you want. Because failure is a massive, massive part of success. They are not separate of each other. They are two sides to the same coin. And you've heard me say it many times before. The creator of Honda says success is 99% failure. If you're not trying to fail, you're not trying to succeed. And so what I would recommend to you, fail more, become more comfortable with it, get exposure therapy. The more that you do it, the less that you really care about, quote, unquote, failure. You see it as a mistake. You see it as a way to learn and a way for you to get better. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me obdial jr r o b D I A L J R and Once again, if you want to get some inspirational mindset text messages for me, text me right now. 512-580-9305 once again. 512-580-9305 and with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.