Page 166 - Hard Goals

Difficult 157

• People will never believe in me again.
• I’ll never believe in myself again.
• I’ll die from embarrassment.
• If I can’t do this, it means I’ll never be able to do any-
thing.
• It’ll mean that I’m not as smart/talented/skilled as I like
to think I am.
• This is my only shot at this. (In other words, it’s now or
never, you only get one bite at the apple, and so forth.)
• It means I’m stuck in this state forever.

There are two big problems with these statements. First,
often when we describe what will happen to us if we fail, we use
words like never, always, only, die. These are serious and highly
charged words, and they refl ect a deep level of fear. Saying, “I’ll
die of embarrassment if I fail to achieve this goal” is probably a
bit of an overstatement when we assess the actual facts. But it is
a true refl ection of how intensely we feel these fears (even if we
don’t acknowledge that intensity at a conscious level).
It’s not unexpected for us to feel a fear of failure, but the
intensity of our feelings can often rival or even exceed the fear
we feel from things that might truly kill us. When a fear of fail-
ure stops us from tackling a goal, 99 percent of the time the fear
we feel is very different from the fear we’d feel if a saber-toothed
tiger were charging at us.
Some fear is very healthy. From an evolutionary perspective,
being afraid of saber-toothed tigers, lions, and spiders kept us
alive. But there are times in this modern world, far away from
the dangers of actual saber-toothed tigers, that our fear reac-
tions get pointed to something quite abstract, and perhaps even
imagined. If you fail in your goal to escape a saber-toothed