Befriend Your Fear of Failure as a Parent

Fear of Failure: What Might You Miss Out On if You Let It Win?

I’ve just been asked to do a last-minute national radio interview tomorrow morning. It’ll be my first time on live radio. It’s in my area of expertise... a topic I feel comfortable with and have a strong opinion on.

Even so, when I looked at the lineup and the people I’d be speaking alongside — an Innovation Expert and someone with multiple PhDs (at least, that’s what I’m telling myself!) — my inner voice kicked in fast.

“What have I got to offer?”
“What value do I bring?”

Then came the mental images of me saying something stupid, freezing, or completely screwing it up.

But here’s the difference now...

I catch that inner voice.
I smile at those images.
And I replace them with better ones.

As Albert Einstein said: “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

That quote grounds me every time.

As parents, we do the best we can with what we know. There is no doubt we’ll mess up at times. We’ll lose our temper. We’ll misjudge a situation. We’ll say the wrong thing or forget the thing that matters most to our child in that moment.

But the real question is this:

What might you NOT do at all... because you were too afraid to get it wrong?

We often think fear of failure is a flaw. But there’s something even more paralysing — fearing the fear of failure.

When you make fear of failure your companion instead of your enemy, you soften its grip. You let it walk beside you instead of leading the way. And from that place, you’ll find yourself braver than you expected... maybe even in new territory.

Tomorrow, I’ll be hanging out with my fear of failure. Not running from it. Not shutting it down. Just being with it, and showing up anyway.

Want to build the kind of confidence that grows with you — even in parenting moments that feel shaky or uncertain? Learn about Resetting Your Beliefs in my Stressed to Best Parent Method and start changing your inner voice, one belief at a time.