How to Overcome the Fear of Failure

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I was watching Warren Buffet on TV last night. He was discussing philanthropy and mentioned the importance of making mistakes – that it demonstrated innovation.And that, “if you don’t make mistakes you can’t make decisions”.
Adding to Buffet’s statement I think you could also say that if you are afraid to make mistakes you are also afraid to make decisions. How on earth can you run an organization if you’re fearful of making decisions?
You hear over and over how innovative leaders are required to not be afraid of making mistakes and not be afraid of admitting when s/he has made mistakes. And in today’s market being innovative is synonymous to organizational success - regardless of what sector you work in.
Though I try to always be an innovative leader there have been times when I’ve become fearful of making mistakes and looking foolish (and closely following that have been thoughts about how others would view my mistakes as incompetence).Isn’t it just plain human nature to fear making mistakes and having others thinking you’re a fool?
As children we grow up constantly receiving messages from others, like our parents or teachers, to not make mistakes; that making a mistake could lead to consequences such as being punished or failing a science project.
I recall a time when, as kids, my sister and I convinced my brother he could fly. We told him all he had to do was to wear a cape (read bed sheet) and jump out the second story window of our house. We theorized that if it worked for Superman it could work for anyone. But not wanting to base our entire inventiveness on just the Superman theory we decided to ensure success by testing things out on a small plastic army guy and a napkin.And it worked – on the army guy.
Having done our research we decided it was time to implement our invention on our brother.In our youth we lacked the fear of making a mistake (and subsequent consequences such as punishment, or worse, our brother getting hurt).We happily helped our brother through the second story window encouraging him to jump with words of how he would be the first on our block to fly like Superman (first mover advantage at its finest) and reminding him of how well it had worked with the plastic army guy and napkin.
Well, like many risk-taking leaders we were wrong.However, we took what we learned from this experience, shifted our focus and applied what we learned to something less harmful (creating mud pies and convincing other kids that they were chocolate – and for them to take a bite). Through it all we learned much – including some pretty strong sale’s skills.However, over the years, as we got older, it became increasingly more difficult to maintain an entrepreneurial spirit and continue to try new things – we began to learn the fear of making mistakes.
Overcoming some of the hang-ups instilled on us as children can be challenging.Many of us battle with the fear of failure our entire lives.As leaders we want to/need to be viewed as being competent and strong – not failures.Management and Boards want to feel they can trust and depend on the organizational leaders they’ve hired.
It’s challenging for any leader to be viewed as both competent (an expert full of capabilities) and innovative (a director of missteps) especially when Management doesn’t understand that for success to happen you need to make mistakes.However, by following a simple 3-step rule leaders can increase their confidence and diminish their fear of making mistakes:
1. Own it,
2. Learn from it
3. Apply lessons learned (repeat as needed).
Example: Years ago some colleagues and I were brainstorming about a new fundraising idea. We created really amazing (or so we thought) widgets to sell. Well, as hard as we tried the widgets we created wouldn’t sell and we were left with a great deal of left over product sitting around gathering dust.However, we didn’t allow this ‘failure’ to discourage us. We reviewed why the widgets didn’t sell, and then built on what we learned. This led to the creation of a new widget that did and continues to sell.

I didn’t fail ten thousand times.I successfully eliminated ten thousand materials and combinations that didn’t work.
Thomas Edison

PS: my brother received a few bumps and bruises as a result of his failed flight plus he gained great satisfaction in seeing his two older sisters get punished.