Fight Anxiety By Risking Failure
Jeff’s eyes narrowed under his mop of red hair. Tension coiled like a compressed spring in every muscle of his body. Sunlight reflected from the water below danced across the boy’s skinny frame in dappled patterns of gold. Nervously licking his lips he sighed “I can’t do it. Let’s just forget the whole stupid thing and go home.”
His friend, two years older, was having none of it. “No Jeff, we’re not going home. Not yet anyways. All you’ve been talking about is how this is the summer you’ll make the jump off old Beetle Butt. You’ve seen me do it last year, and all the other guys as well. Time to man up Jeff.” Waiting for a second, his friend added “You’re gonna have to wear your big boy pants today… they may not fit at first…” he stopped to suppress a laugh “but I suspect you’ll grow into em in time.”
“Shut up Cliff” the younger boy replied more as a plea than a command. “I’m ten years old and I don’t need to man up for another three or four years at least. That’s a fact. I read it somewhere.”
Cliff laughed. The sort of friendly dismissive laugh that older friends seem to perfect when they are children. “Sure thing Jeff. Bet you read that on that back of your stupid Marvel comics.”
“You know what? I don’t care what you think because I just need to stop telling you about these dumb ideas whenever they get into my head. In fact, why didn’t you tell me how stupid it was when I first mentioned it? That’s what friends do… they let you know when you’re being crazy. Forget it, I’m not jumping into that water.”
“Now, now Jeff. That’s just the chicken in you talking. Don’t go listening to a squawky little bird running around in your head. You’re gonna jump off old Beetle Butt here or we ain’t leaving. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen?”
“I could die Cliff. I could break my neck on the rocks, or get eaten by crocs.”
Jeff continued standing, nervously shifting from one foot to the other. But Cliff decided to have a seat, his legs casually dangling off the ledge.
They were on a sun drenched boulder that rose like a giant fist from the middle of Glendon’s Reservoir. The rock was massive, with a peak that stood twenty feet above the water.
Two ledges on the boulder were used as platforms from which youngsters would, every summer, hurl themselves into space and let gravity do its work.
The upper most ledge was affectionately known as ‘Certain Death.’ The lower ledge on which the boys were now perched had long ago been christened ‘Mike’s Mistake’ - for reasons that no one could remember.
The boys had taken their paddle boards out from shore earlier in the day and now, with the sun high above, had begun to play out Jeff’s anxious drama.
“Tell you what” Cliff eventually responded with a thoughtful tone. “You’re not going to die from jumping off this ledge. It’s only ten feet up from the water. And you already saw me swimming around the spot you’ll be jumping into… I checked, there aren’t any hidden rocks. Just like there aren’t any crocodiles, alligators, mermaids or sharks for that matter.”
“The only animal that’s causing you trouble is that chicken that keeps clucking inside your head. Once you jump, let me tell you, that bird won’t make a peep.”
Jeff took a deep breath, started to say something but thought better of it, and quietly sat down next to his friend. The heat of the day was beginning to rise, and sun beat down on their shoulders with a familiar and comforting sting. Buzzing somewhere overhead was a dragon fly, and the smell of BBQ wafted out from the shoreline.
Suddenly Jeff bolted upright and stood clinching his fist, his breathing having become labored like a steam engine. Then, without uttering a word, he lept from the boulder, legs and arms akimbo, falling silent as a turtle, but not half so gracefully, into the green water below.
Cliff winced when he saw his friend’s unceremonious belly flop. The sound of Jeff’s body slamming into the water reminded him of the smack his father’s hand made when swatting a fly on their linoleum countertop. A moment later Jeff resurfaced and let out a triumphant scream, his face beaming with delight.
The ‘coming of age’ jump from the boulder had not gone exactly according to plan, but the main thing that needed to happen had indeed happened… A ten year old boy had faced his fears and learned that doing so, even imperfectly, did wonders to build his confidence and rob anxiety of its power to control him.
The Nature Of Anxiety Gives Clues On How To Defeat It
At the heart of anxiety is the double helix of uncertainty and threat.
Uncertainty is, for the most part, focused on whether one can deal with whatever situation has galvanized the anxiety. Do you have the ability to succeed, and if you don’t prevail do you have the ability to pick yourself up and move on in life non the worse for wear?
The greater one’s uncertainty, the more one’s anxiety is likely to rise.
The threat aspect, not surprisingly, is focused on what might happen if you cannot successfully face some challenging situation, crisis, or event. That is, what might be the result of failure. As a general rule, the greater the cost of failure, the greater the anxiety.
Some people try and resolve anxiety by building up their ability to solve whatever challenges may come their way.
Others deal with anxiety by minimizing the chance that they will be forced to face any threatening challenges.
Neither of these are, by themselves, realistic solutions. No one can build enough skills to be ready to face any possible challenge. And avoiding the big challenges in life is not only doomed to fail, but is 100% guaranteed to make life a tepid and anemic slog through each day of the week. Adventure requires risk, so a life devoted to avoiding risk is a life devoted to avoiding adventure.
The road less travelled is that which focuses on building one’s ability to rebound from failure. It requires building a perspective that responds confidently when asked “What if I’m not up to that challenge just yet, and it all comes crashing down… can I get up, dust myself off, being better for having attempted it, and keep going?”
When you answer this question in the affirmative, fear begins to drain away.
Anxiety feeds on miscalculation and exaggeration. Both of these qualities are difficult to manufacture when you feel confident that whatever the outcome may be, you’ll bounce back.
That is, you have confidence in being tough enough to survive, even thrive, when things don’t go well.
This sort of confidence comes as a result of what one does with failure. When it is used to learn new lessons, to become wiser, better informed, and more resolute, confidence emerges.
This is not the same as arrogance. That would be thinking “I’m capable of doing anything and everything” and I’m 100% certain to succeed.
The confidence that arises from successfully failing is the quiet conviction of knowing “I’m tough enough to experience a setback and still keep moving forward.”
Failures As The Fuel For Confidence
No one succeeds 100% of the time. Some of us have much better records of success than others, but even the best do not always hit the mark.
Consequently, we know that failure comes to visit everyone from time to time. Some people respond to failure with great anguish. If they experience repeated failures in a brief period of time they become dejected, drained of all confidence.
Others, however, respond to repeated failure with growing self-assurance and certitude about their future. For these people failure has been a boon, a push in the right direction. It crystallized their recognizing that failure does not define them, nor does it act as a final pronouncement on their worth.
Instead, failure becomes just another opportunity to learn, a chance to grow stronger, a way station on the road to success.
It is very curious that nearly everyone is born with this healthy attitude toward failure – but not everyone will maintain it into adulthood. Those who possess the healthy attitude become adventurous adults. On the other hand, those with an unhealthy fear of failure live more confined and circumscribed lives.
You can see this “Failure don’t scare me” attitude in toddlers. Specifically, in their never say die approach to learning how to walk. When just learning how to move around on two legs toddlers will fall about 69 times an hour. By age two this goes down to 38 times a day.
Which of us, when faced with failing 69 times each hour, would persist at the task for more than a day or two? But toddlers eagerly and tenaciously push forward, happily getting up each time they fall.
And they continue responding in this way. Even many months later after their walking skills have improved, toddlers will still fall three dozen times a day. No worries they say, let’s try that again.
What’s more, toddlers push forward in this regard even though they are also striving to acquire numerous other skills at the same time (learning to talk, developing self-care skills, etc.). In each of these areas of development the toddler is also failing numerous times each day.
Remarkable tenacity. If you give this just a little thought you’ll be surprised that most toddlers don’t curl up in a corner thinking “I’m such a loser. I can’t walk well, can’t talk in complete sentences, dressing myself is a nightmare, and heck, I still need diapers.”
But instead the world of toddlers is a world of persistent over achievers. Were any adult to demonstrate this type of response in the face of repeated failures they would be held up as a role model.
The Take Away
The thing to learn from this is that an important key to dealing with failure (and the fear of failure) is to put it in perspective. Is it something from which you can recover, learn from, and grow stronger for having experienced?
If you’ve had some healthy experiences with failure as a teen or young adult, your answer will likely be ‘yes.’ If you’ve not had these healthy experiences then you really need to arrange for them.
Yes, you read that correctly. You need to arrange to have some failures that you can learn from. That means you need to take some chances. You need to risk experiencing setbacks and losses that genuinely push you.
Those that cause you to wince, but not back away… where you push back against the pain of having failed and continue to make the most of life.
Those experiences, over time, lead to greater confidence and peace of mind in the face of uncertainty. This frame of mind does not come cheaply, however, and it does not arise by chance. Instead it is hammered out on the anvil of repeated setbacks from which you invariably pick yourself up and press forward in life.
But, like most hard won victories, the rewards are immense. The number of doors that then become available for you to open, and explore what lies beyond, makes it well worth the effort.
