One of the people who has participated in my workshops sent an email asking for any tips on overcoming fear of failure. In this case, it relates to doing stand-up comedy, one of the scariest things to attempt (I know, I tried it...once) but the same principles apply to fear of failing in anything. Here's what I suggested--if you are afraid of failing in some endeavor, maybe it can help you, too:
One useful strategy is to re-define success in a given situation. For a stand-up appearance the obvious definition of success might be "to make everybody laugh at every joke and have a great time doing it." But the reality is that not even the most successful stand up comedian makes everybody laugh at every joke. So what if you were to redefine success as, "to learn something useful from this appearance that I can apply to making the next one better" ?
This might include seeing which jokes work best, which ones bomb, which stage moves seem to get the audience paying more attention, how it works to slow down your delivery, how it works to speed up your delivery, etc. Of course it would be great to get a lot of laughs as well, but for sure you can learn something and if you make that your primary definition, it can transform the experience for you.
Related to this, you might specify to yourself before you go on that this time you are going to test one specific thing--again, it might relate to speed of delivery, or how close you stand to the audience, or how much you involve people in the audience, etc.--and your goal is to find out how effective (or not) that specific thing is. That gives you a focus that takes away the focus on fear.
