Christina Rafano warns nursing students about a self-sabotaging cycle: fear of failing makes you avoid studying, which guarantees worse performance. Break it by showing up to study and practice anyway, even when you're scared.
So the thing here about this failure trap is that when we are scared that we're going to fail an exam or totally bomb our skills, check off test like I did a million times, or we're going to totally fail in front of our instructor at clinical, then oftentimes what we will do is not practice our skills or not study or just not do the thing we need to do because we are scared of failing. Failing. That's how this failure trap works. So if you're scared of failing an exam, it's very likely that you're not going to study as hard or as well for that exam just because you have so much fear of failure. So we just. It's almost like you don't want to put yourself out there and try your hardest. Because then it's like, like, I don't know. This is true for me at least if. If you almost don't want to try your hardest. Because then if you don't pass or if you fail your exam, then it's like, well, I didn't really try my hardest anyway, so it doesn't really count. Not the case, right? We want to put in our best work. We want to do the best we can in order to try our hardest to succeed. Because if you don't, then your risk of failing the exam goes up. Right? So if you are, it's almost like this vicious cycle. If you're scared of failing your exam, then you're not going to study as well for your exam and then you are more likely to fail that examination.
