Learn how to overcome the fear of failure as a student and achieve your academic goals. Change your mindset, set realistic goals, and embrace challenges to succeed.
“Fear is a powerful adaptation mechanism that allows the psyche to provide us with safety in critical situations. Nowadays, the reasons for anxiety are often associated not with real physical threats, but with social pressure, someone else’s or one’s own negative experience. The fear of failure is also a type of phobia. Let’s figure out why it occurs and how to deal with it
The possibility of failure will be even more latent if you do not learn to trust in your abilities.
- Fear of failure can lead students to drop out of school or prevent them from reaching their full potential.
- Students at all educational levels must learn to combat this fear, and teachers must learn to motivate their students.
- Learning to overcome crises and setbacks is one of the most sought-after skills in the workplace.
Even if you prepare ahead of time and dream about it for months, facing the challenge of starting a university course can be truly shocking. Everything you thought about this moment starts to become a reality, and with it, new fears arise.
The fear of academic failure is one of the most common fears in learning and studying. In fact, academic institutions around the world have specific measures in place to ask their teachers to take concrete actions to encourage students and thus prevent them from dropping out of school.
Where does the fear of failure come from?
Lack of self-confidence
Phobias do not come from outside. Sometimes they are the result of internal processes of self-blame and self-punishment. Conflicts and depression that arise from low self-esteem form the basis for a constant fear of difficulties.
Traumatic childhood experience
For example, a failed performance at a competition or an unsuccessful attempt to please loved ones with a handmade gift. These seemingly insignificant events cause feelings of guilt and shame in the child. They may accompany him in the future.
Childhood traumas create a negative expectation program, where any event is perceived as potentially unpleasant. As a result, in adulthood, a person suffers from low self-esteem and chooses an avoidance strategy to avoid facing a repetition of past experiences.
How to Overcome Fear of Failure as a Student
Make sure you plan each of your academic sessions as much as possible. It will help you have more control over them and therefore reduce fear.
Do you think you are incapable of getting the best grade in your class? Go ahead and try to learn what you are capable of.
Surrounding yourself with positive people, who you can turn to when you have fears or doubts, will be an effective way to face moments of crisis.
These can help you gain self-confidence, and above all, learn victory and defeat like no other activity can.
Learn to talk about what worries you, when you express it, it will take on its true dimensions.
If you feel like you’re going to make a decision motivated by fear of failure, don’t wait until fear wins. Find someone to talk to about it to bring out your more rational side.
Work through traumatic situations
Think about what events in the past became the basis for the formation of fear. This could be a lack of recognition from adults in childhood or the suppression of desires and needs in later life. Analyze these situations on your own or with a psychologist. This way, you will be able to rethink your beliefs and begin to take the initiative without fear of mistakes and defeats.
Change your attitude towards failures and mistakes
Try to look at them in a new way. Many of us perceive mistakes and rejections as failures. But in reality, a mistake is just a process of deviation from the desired result.
When we design new goals, we don’t know for sure how we should achieve them. We don’t have a ready-made algorithm for guaranteed success. Making mistakes is a search for working methods to accomplish the tasks set.
This is an integral and necessary stage, without which there will be no development and accumulation of useful experience. If you want to be in the present and build the future – be prepared to make mistakes and learn to “live” your mistake.
Focus on actions, not emotions
Often we put the fact of what happened “on the same level” with the emotions that we experience at that moment. Failure, like a mistake, is only a quantitative and qualitative deviation from the goal. Emotions reflect the assessment that we give to what is happening, to ourselves and to others.
It is important to distinguish and separate these two aspects. Any failure is a reason to work on mistakes, adjust your behavior and processes to achieve a result, and not to engage in self-flagellation or enter into impulsive showdowns with other people. Try to focus not on emotions, but on solving the problem.
4. Overcome the fear of being punished
Often, the fear of failure is inextricably linked with the fear of punishment. Certain questions will help you check whether you have it:
- “What punishment do I expect?”
- “Am I punishing myself?”
- “Does this affect my self-esteem?”
By answering them, you can better understand what caused your fear of failure and distance yourself from it.
Academic counsellors or advisors are the reference figures within the University for achieving this. However, both your colleagues and teachers or students from the student association or larger courses can help you see why you should not pay attention to your fears