Conquering the Fear of Failure: Master Your Mindset

Welcome to today's video. Today we're gonna be talking about the number one fear that I hear from people that holds them back from creating the life that they want, the fear of failure. We're gonna talk about the fear of failure, and I'm gonna teach you how to get past it. Let's dive in. There's many times where I'm running a zoom or I'm on a call or I'm in front of a group of people and, you know, I'll be on a weekly session with my mindset mentor university people and I'll say, hey, what's everyone's number one fear that holds them back from creating the life they want? 90 to 95% of the time, it's the fear of failure. Like, without fail, it's always the fear of failure dominates. Are the other ones the fear of rejection, the fear of not being loved, all of that? Yes. But the fear of failure is the one that dominates everyone else's head. And so I decided I'm going to do an episode specifically on the fear of failure. I believe personally that fear is absolutely 100% the worst thing in the world. You know, it stops us from chasing our dreams. That's it. Like, fear gets in the way of chasing our dreams. It stops people from having the life that they truly want. It stops people from starting that business. It stops people from pursuing that dream. Fear is also the root of hate. When you fear something, when you have hate, you hate that thing because you fear what you do not know. And so the fear holds everybody back from creating the life that they want. But also, in my opinion, it is also the root of hate because you fear what you do not know. And if you truly knew someone else, another person, like I'm talking about, like, you freaking knew them, you wouldn't hate ever hate somebody. You would understand them, you know, if you knew and you understood the other person, their past, what they've gone through, their. The things that have. Have been terrible in their lives, everything that happened to them. You can never hate them. Which means that fear is the root of all of the problems. You know, it's like fear is the root of any type of war. I fear your country and what your country will do and could act first. So I'm not going to have you beat me. So I'm going to attack first. You know, I'm going to go to war with you because I have a fear of you guys attacking me and I have a fear of death. And so we're going to go Ahead and go on the quote, unquote offensive, right? And so when we look at fear, in my opinion, fear is the worst thing that exists in the world because it holds us back from creating the life that we want. But then also, at the same time, it is the root of hate. And so when we look at fear and we look at the fear of failure, specifically, when you look at the fear of failure, the fear of failure, really, interestingly enough, has nothing to do with failure. It's a fear that all of my insecurities will come to light. So, you know, if I go out there and I go, you know what? I'm gonna start a business, and I'm gonna start this business. And I have the fear of what if this business fails? It's not really the failure of the business that I'm afraid of. It's that when the business. I'm sorry, if the business fails, then I'm going to finally see I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough, I'm not intelligent, I'm not worthy of X, Y, Z. And so it's not really that the actual event of the failure that I'm afraid of, it's I'm afraid that if this happens, all of my insecurities that I try to run from, that I try to act like don't exist, will then come to light. Because at the center of everyone's fears is I'm not good enough. And if I fail, it will be shown to me that I am not good enough to succeed. So what do most people choose? Oh, well, instead of that, instead of seeing my insecurities, I would rather live a life of mediocrity so I don't have to see the places where I'm not good enough. I fear being judged. And so I won't start that business because if it fails, I know for sure someone's gonna judge me. So I don't wanna be judged. And if I do fail in this business, oh, my God, they're gonna. I'm probably gonna be judged even harder. And so a lot of times, most times, the fear of failure literally has nothing to do with failure in the first place. It's that if I do fail, my insecurities that I'm trying to run from are gonna come to light. So if you've ever felt the fear of failure, what are the insecurities that failing would bring to light? Think about that for a second. What are you running from? What are you so afraid to see? Because in this case, one of my favorite quotes that goes along with this is that the cave that you're afraid to enter holds the treasure that you seek, the thing that you're afraid to do holds the treasure that you seek. The freedom that you're trying to get from not feeling worthy, not having enough self worth, not feeling like you're good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, whatever it might be. Not gonna be a good parent. Because when you screw up, you're not failing. This is a crazy part about it. Like I've Personally now I'm 37 years old, but I started in my first business at 19, so. So I've been failing for half of my, I've been fucking up things for half of my life all the time, right? When you screw up, that's not failing. I have, I screw up every single day, multiple times a day in everything that I do in my business. Everything. But that's not failing, that's screwing up. And we, we, we tend to look at screw ups as failure. Failure is not final. Failure is just a function. It's something that you're supposed to learn from. It's falling more than anything else. You fell down. Okay, well, what are you supposed to learn from it? You only actually fail at something when you give up on that thing. So if I want to start, let's go back to the business example, right? If I want to start this business and I'm afraid of failure, if I go out and I run this business for six months and I still don't get into the positive, like I'm still running it negative, and I haven't gotten the revenue to where I want to be. Like let's say for instance, I want to get my revenue to $10,000 a month in six months. And in six months I met $1,000 a month. I haven't failed. There's no failure in there. I've screwed up, I've messed up. But through that I've learned how not to bring in $10,000 a month. And so when you fail, when you, I'm sorry, when you fall, that's not failure. And so the only time you actually fail is when you give up. So if you get to six months ago, oh my gosh, I'm at one tenth of my goal. I'm not going to do this anymore. That is when it becomes a failure. When you gave up and think about this, how many times have you given up on yourself throughout your life? When you see someone that's successful, you just see someone who just didn't give up. That's all that you see, you see a stubborn person who can't give up. That's really what you see. The most successful people are the most stubborn people. You know, if you look at Honda, the creator of Honda has a quote that says, success is 99% failure. That's what it is. The great thing about success, the really great thing about success is you just have to not fail one time. You just have to not screw up one time. You just have to find success one time. So it's literally like opening a bunch of doors and none of them work, and none of them work, and none of them work, and none of them work for a month, two months, six months, a year, two years. And then eventually you find the one that works. You know, like I always say to people, if I said, hey, if I gave you like, you know when you look at a janitor in the movies and they have that big, huge ring, and on the ring they have like 500 keys. What if I gave you one, one of those rings with 10,000 keys and I was like, hey, this is a door right here. One of these keys works. But on the other side of this door is $1,000,000. Would you go through every single key to find out which one works? Absolutely. Now, does that mean that all of the other keys were failures? No, they were just the one that didn't work. Really? That's how success is. It's the same way. It's 9,999 screw ups. Then you finally get the one key that works. And does it take time? It does. Everybody wants success immediately. Everybody wants instant gratification. But it takes years to build something that's really great. There's a reason why the phrase Rome wasn't built in a day exists. Like, when I look back to me and just my business and this podcast is a great example, right? Like, the podcast did decent when I started in 2015. It did decent. We did pretty well. But for about three years. So it was 2015, 2016 started growing for about three or four years. I was level at the exact same number every single month for about three or four years. Almost no growth. And then something happened in 2020, and it was like a hockey stick moment. And the numbers went from like, pretty level to just like, holy crap, it exploded. But it took me starting the business or starting the podcast in 2015 Five Fucking Years to Get to 2020, where it finally had that hockey stick moment. I had five years of being so freaking stubborn to not give up. But before it finally took off. Most people are not willing to continue to keep going until they find success. Right? I've screwed up many times in growing this podcast and growing the business that I have. I just, you know, didn't wake up and go, oh, my gosh, we're doing a couple million downloads a year. No, I didn't wake up and get to this point, you know, and it took time to get to a point. And so, you know, it was crazy where we were, like, you know, leveling off at like 100,000 downloads a month for years, and then it, like 40x in a couple months. And so it's like, when I look at the podcast and look at my business, when I look at everything that I do, I probably succeed, like, 5% of the time. The rest is just me throwing stuff at the wall and trying to find out what sticks, you know? And, like, for me, when I keep using the podcast as an example. But, like, when I first started the podcast, I had read an article that says the average person who starts a podcast does seven episodes, and then they quit. And this was back in 2015, when not many people did podcasts. And I thought to myself, all right, I just. I'll do 14. And if I like it at 14, I just won't stop. And if I don't stop, I'll probably figure it out. I'll probably succeed. I committed to 14. We're at over 1300 podcast episodes at this point. And so it just. It just. It takes time. Almost 300 million downloads. It just takes time, and people are not willing to. To put in the time. I just didn't stop. I'm not that great. I just didn't stop. And so I want you to understand the exact same thing. Like, you're gonna fail. You're gonna mess up. I've failed many times. I've had bad reviews. I've had crappy comments. I've had emails saying that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but I didn't care what other people are saying. I just kept going. And so you gotta start to think about this, like, where could you be in your life if you stopped listening to the fear of failure and just started whatever it is that you want to start, and then when you, quote, unquote, failed or fell or screwed up, whatever it is that you want to call it, what if you just kept going and you didn't stop? Where could you be in five years? How different could your life be today? Like I told you, it took me five years of the podcast before it finally really exploded. Where could you be in five years if you stopped listening to the fear of failure? If you stopped paying attention to other people said, and you just started doing something and you just decided, I'm not going to stop. I'm going to put five years into this thing. The problem is that most people are not willing to put five years into something. And so you have to. It's a great example of the Chinese bamboo. You put the seed inside of the. Inside of the ground, you water it, you give it sun. And Chinese bamboo does not grow outside of the soil for about five to six years. And at year five, year six, it will grow up to 80ft in six months. That's what success looks like. It's five years of screwing it up and trying to figure it out. You have to have something that I call failure amnesia. Don't think about the times that you failed. Think about your successes, even if it's just once. Think about why you will succeed versus why you haven't in the past. Because what's more important is your future, not your past. Your past doesn't dictate your future. Why can I say that? I've had multiple failed businesses in the past, quote, unquote, failed. I learned a lot from them. But it doesn't mean that when I start this business or when I started this business that it would fail because I had other failed businesses. Because it's. You never walk through the same river twice. I'm not the same person, and it's not the same river. I'm not the same person as I was when I had those failed businesses. And, you know, the business is not the same as it was back then. And so you have to understand that when you look at the fear of failure, it's usually not the fear of failure in the first place. There's insecurities that are behind it. And what you really have to understand is that, is that your fear will never go away. Fear will probably be omnipresent in your life. Successful people are not fearless. I hate when someone says, and now we're gonna bring up our fearless leader, and they say their name. No, your fearless leader is not fearless. They are scared shitless a lot of the time. But the difference is they do it anyways. They feel the fear and they do it anyways. You have to learn to do the same. For me, I'm more afraid of dying and not seeing my true potential than I am the fear of failure. That's if I were to get to the end of my life and be on my Deathbed and not realize my full potential. That's what I'm afraid of. Way more than somebody judging me or someone rejecting me or the fear of failure in some sort of way that drives me to do more. And to be honest with you, like, I expect failure. I expect failure. You have to expect failure. You have to expect not doing it the way that you want to. And maybe I'll take the word failure out. You have to expect screwing up. You have to expect falling. You have to expect all of that. But those are the moments when you learn the most, and you have to feel the fear and do it anyways. You have to kind of like, dance with the fear. It's like the tango, right? You got to dance with it. It's going to be there. It's not leaving you. And so it's more like, okay, I know the fear is going to be here. I know this feeling. I know what it feels like. You know what? I'm going to do it anyways. I'm gonna dance with this fear. I'm gonna allow this fear to. Is it possible that I can use this fear to actually create something better versus it holding me back? Is there a way to use it to make something better? If you're writing a book and you have a fear that it's gonna be this shit book, can you use that fear? Instead of stopping you from putting the book out, can you use that fear to go, you know what? I'm gonna do some extra editing sessions. I'm gonna do some more research. I'm gonna look at this book and say, can I make this even better? And now you're using the fear to actually make a better book versus stopping you from writing the book in the first place. So instead of fear paralyzing you, it can then propel you to do something better. The issue with fear is that you've trained yourself. We've all trained ourselves with fear. We feel fear and we stop. We feel fear and we stop. We feel fear and we stop. It's kind of like Pavlov's dogs. They ring the bell, bing, bing, and then when the bell rings, they give them a treat. And then they ring the bell, and they give them a treat. They ring the bell and they give them a treat, and eventually they ring the bell. And the dog, the. Its mouth starts salivating. Its body is already expecting that treat. You've trained yourself to feel fear and back off. You need to retrain your brain. You need to retrain yourself that when I feel fear, because fear, we all know that. That your comfort zone is what you have to get out of in order to create the life you want. Right? Because your comfort zone is where you currently are. And so if I'm going to change something, if I'm going to change my life, I need to get out of my comfort zone. Well, the beautiful thing about fear is that fear is the physical manifestation in your body of your comfort zone. When you feel fear, it is showing you that you have reached the end of your comfort zone. So instead of backing away, which is staying in your comfort zone, lean in just a little bit. Oh, my gosh. I'm feeling really a whole lot of fear right now. Why am I okay? It's probably because I'm at the edge of my comfort zone. So instead of backing away, I'm gonna lean in just a little bit more. Right? You have to retrain your brain to move towards the fear versus moving away from the fear. Expect the fear. It's going to be there. It's going to be omnipresent. Do it anyways. Dance with the fear. And remember this. You only have to succeed one time. That's the beautiful thing about it. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram. Stories. Tag me obdialjr. R O B D I A L J R Once again, for those of you that are in the United States of Canada, if you want to see the inspirational texts and videos from me to your phone, 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 someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.