For a long time, I have known that my biggest fear was to fail – mainly to have a business or work failure. Despite my experience of going through failures, learning, and growing from them, this fear persists and occupies a considerable space when I’m facing challenges.
The fear I am referring to is a state of imagination for a potential failure that might arise in the near or far future.
During the last months, the economy started to slow down. With no potential project opportunities on the horizon, I became anxious and worried about what could happen and what I would be facing soon. I started to panic, and I became fearful as the shape of a failure began to form into my imagination.
Surprisingly, plans turned out to be different, and suddenly one project after another started to roll up, reaching a point where I became overwhelmed with work. My strategy shifted from being anxious about the lack of project to worrying about handling too much work. Suddenly, the fear of failure changed shape and appeared in different forms.
It did not take a lot of effort to recognize that sudden shift from fear to fear. I played the dramatic and perpetual music that helps me sink into fear by creating an imaginary failure signpost.
I noticed that what truly scares me is how I create and imagine failure and how I define and relate to this failure. While looking one more time for a way out, this time, I remembered a story that we link to Albert Einstein, which goes like this:
“A teacher wanted to prove to his student that religious faith was a myth, and he asked and concluded to his student that God created everything, and since evil exists, then God might be evil.
The student asks the teacher if the cold exists and proves to his teacher, according to the law of physics, that cold does not exist, and we have created this world only to describe how we feel when we have no heat.
Similarly, the student asks the teacher if darkness exists, and the student explains that darkness cannot be measured and is a measurement of the amount of light that defines darkness.
Then the student concluded that evil is simply the relative absence of God; what we see evil is when we are unaware of the presence of God’s love in our heart.”
As I remember this story, a light flashed into my mind, and my heart awakens to realize that, similarly, failure does not exist. Failure is simply the absence to see the success that is present in every situation.
As the work was slowing down, I envision and associated failure with a risk or uncertainty, which I hope to avoid encountering. Likewise, when the work picked up, I imagined failure to be a possible danger in meeting a new emerging challenge.
In both cases, what I saw as a failure is a doubt in my ability to meet these arising situations. As I classify them as a possible failure, I was not aware of the possibility of success available in these circumstances.
The only things that I was imagining and projecting are my past knowledge, experience, and past feelings and interpretations of failure leading me to this state of fear.
I have learned to relate success to a positive accomplishment that generates positive emotion and failure, to negative results, leading to negative emotions.
I have created this analogy, same as the teacher in the class made his notion about evil and wanted everyone to believe in it.
Failure does not exist, similar to cold and darkness.
What if success has no opposite and I live my life from a place of success and see how much I succeed in every opportunity, challenge, and arising risk?
Then, my fear of failure would measure how much I will succeed. By redesigning failure into success, fear vanishes by losing its purpose.
When failure becomes a function of success, fear disappears, opportunities and enthusiasm appear, growth and love rise.
For a while, I have learned that success is not the absence of failure but our ability to face failure with courage.
Today I am learning that failure does not exist and it is simply a measurement of success. We do not need to face failure but to ride the rising waves of success by knowing that we are constantly flowing with the wave of success no matter how high or low the tide is.
When we choose to see success as a way of living, growing through life, and measuring how successful we are in responding to every challenge, then this would be the end of our fear of failure and the beginning of the failure of fear.
How do you measure your success?
When are you the least successful? And the most successful?