How to Overcome Fear of Failure and Build Career Confidence

What if failure wasn’t something to avoid—but a skill to master? In this episode, I share a fresh take on how to handle setbacks, manage your mind, and turn mistakes into momentum.

• Why your brain resists failure (and how to outsmart it)
• The mindset shift that transforms “mistakes” into data
• How to stop hiding in research and start taking action
• Understand what creates confidence 

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Failure Used To Wreck Me
• 1:02 High-Risk Careers And Burnout
• 1:35 Flipping The Script On Failure
• 2:37 Schooling, Conditioning, And Fear
• 3:14 Failure As A Path To Success
• 4:10 Slow Down And Study The Wins
• 4:17 Get The Data, Then Decide
• 5:16 Process Feelings Without Hiding
• 5:28 The Wallow: Highlights And Lowlights
• 6:08 Thoughts About Data Drive Action
• 7:08 Morning Check-Ins And Intent
• 8:05 Consumption Vs Action
• 9:15 Confidence Comes From Reps
• 10:07 Recap And Next Steps
• 11:11 Share, Reflect, And Be Kind

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hey there, welcome back. I'm Jill Griffin, your host of the Career Refresh. And today we are talking about failure because I want to tell you that failure used to wreck me, right? It didn't matter if it was like a messed-up marketing campaign or any of the times that I got laid off. It was a spiral of anxiety, a little bit of obsessive thinking, and basically arguing with reality like I actually had a chance of winning the argument. All of this was really unhelpful. Sometimes I would freeze. Sometimes I wanted to like kind of find a cashmere blanket and an ottoman and just like be really like soft and gentle with myself, but refusing to move forward. And because it felt really scary, like I don't want to have this experience again. I don't want to be in this situation again. Look, I spent most of my career in, you know, tech, health, uh, ed tech, health tech, digital marketing, hospitality. These are all extremely fast-moving industries. And when you're essentially living like the stock market of your own life, right? You're in this high risk, high reward. It can be totally exhilarating. Except I was treating my entire career like I needed to flip a coin because I didn't know if it was going to be a signing bonus or a severance package. Was this accurate? Yeah, kind of, maybe. Was it helpful? Not at all. So the roller coaster became exhausting, right? I was tired all the time. I was anxious. And I was starting to feel like I didn't exactly know what move to make next. And that was because I had to learn how to rethink failure, right? I like to say like wear failure like a loose garment. And it doesn't, you don't want it to like suffocate you. You don't want to be dragging it everywhere, but it also needs to be looked at when you have failures and thinking about what do you need to do next. And that's what I want to unpack today, right? It's how flipping my thinking on failure really helps me through managing my brain and looking at the data and knowing that there's times where my brain is going to be a total jerk and tell me stories. And it doesn't mean it's true, even if in the moment it feels true for me, right? So most of us, if we get into it, have an automatic resistance to failure. I mean, let's look at it. Like it is when was the last time you had a big fail? If you're thinking about that failure, take a pause, take a beat. What is it? Is it stress? Is it fear? Is it anxiety? Is it that like foreboding dread and just sort of like, oh gosh, what's going to happen? And that's because what I've learned is that so much of what we think about failure was drilled to us in our schooling, right? If you got the answer wrong, you failed. If you failed the test, you failed. If you fail enough times, guess what? You're going to be held back or you're going to have to have some sort of remedial support in order to get you to move forward. And that ends up burning really bright in our psyche. My clients tell me they have this experience too, that we're we're in this phase of like, oh my God, failure is so bad. And we're wired to believe that failure is always going to feel off-road. And I'm going to hear and tell you, as someone who has been both an employee and now I'm nine years self-employed in entrepreneurial ship, failure is really what's getting me to my success. So just hear me out before you judge, right? It's just becomes one less way of what's going to work and what's not going to work. And the faster you learn to riff on failure, the faster you're going to start seeing results and seeing different results and seeing success. So if you quit or freeze, there is no success because there's no learning. And when you succeed very often, we move on very quickly and we don't reflect. So even in your successes, there may be some failures. And in your failures, there may also be some successes. So what I'm simply suggesting is like, let's just slow down a little bit, right? Maybe you celebrate your successes, but you don't reflect on why it worked. And most of us weren't trained to analyze unless we worked in sort of data-driven environments. So one, I'm going to tell you when you have a failure, get the data. These are the facts. What do we know? It could be hardcore facts, it could be people, places, and things. It's the data that we want. Next, I want you to look at that data and choose how you want to think about it, right? You get to sit in the suckiness and the grossness of that failure if you want to. Or you can look at the data and decide, you know what, based on this information, what do I want to do next? I'm not telling you not to process the failure. If you have disappointment, you may need to sit, you may need to process, you may need really feel the disappointment of that, especially if it's grief about, let's say, like the loss of a job or the loss of an opportunity. You need to do that. That is not what I'm talking about in this episode. I am talking about when we are quickly to achieve or we've sent out a bunch of job interviews, a bunch of resumes for job interviews, and we've gone through a couple of rounds, and then we don't get the job or not the candidate. Yeah, that might feel really sucky. But is there something to learn along the way? Is there something that we can look at about how we're learning to get an opportunity or land a job in this current marketplace? That's where your wins are, right? The thing that we used to do when I worked full time in tech was we would call it the wallow, and we would start dissecting why something worked or why it didn't. And I mean, the name alone, wallow, could make you want to puke or like shudder, right? But it was time to capture all the learnings. It was okay to be uncomfortable. This was not a time for finger pointing. It was not a time for accusations. We were investigating everything. We were looking at the highlights, the lowlights. And if this happened again, what would we do next time? Our tendency is often to jump right into what didn't work, the lowlights, right? What went wrong, what we would do differently, how can we prevent this from ever happening again? Right? That's a totally different vibe than saying, okay, yeah, we need to look at what didn't work, but let's also equally spend the time on what did work. And when we did that, we start to think about well, what went right? What process worked? So again, even in the fails, there are wins. And how did you create that win? Getting clear on that, starting to dig in the data and knowing that the data is just data, it's just facts. You can spin and prove almost anything you want looking at data. But I want you to look at the data, know that you're going to have some thoughts about the data. And I want you to really think like, are these thoughts creating positive feelings or negative feelings? I don't want you to blame the data. I don't want you to celebrate the data. I just want you to look at your thoughts around the data. And then that's where you get to decide intentionally with a lens of confidence and empowerment what you are going to do next, right? This is the kind of work that I often suggest you do, like as you're getting ready in the morning, if there was something that you need to process from the day before, really thinking through. Like, I'm not going to blame the data, I'm not going to celebrate the data. I'm going to look at the data and decide intentionally, what do I need to do today? Who needs to be on my A game? What's happening this week? What do I need to think through in the meeting that's coming up, in that job interview, in that conversation? How am I going to use this data to move myself forward? Look, our thoughts about the data are going to create our feelings. And as I've said before, if you're a longtime listener, you know that everything we do in life is because of a feeling we want or because of a feeling we want to avoid. There are no exceptions. So success comes from continually examining our thoughts, looking at our feelings, and then deciding if this is serving me or not and what I want to do next. It really is simple. And I'm telling you, I fail a lot, probably more than I win, but I keep at it. And I'd say nine years post my corporate job, my wins are big. I still have failures. I still have regular failures, but I keep looking at the data and then I make a decision and I get back out there and I try something again. So I'd offer you what it would feel like if you separated your feelings on failure from the facts and you just looked at the data. Would it give you relief? Or calm? Would you feel curious? A thought that I would offer you to think through is how can you put your thoughts around the data into the future tense? I'm willing to learn from my mistakes. There might be successes inside this failure, and I'm willing to take a look. If I don't look now, I'll never know. Right. I don't want you to hide from the data. So many clients tell me that after a failure, they either hide, right? They don't want to look at it, they don't want to look at something like this in their bank account, right? It's the that type of equivalent. Or what they also might do is they start reading and watching and studying and trying to figure out what to do. And yeah, again, I want you to evaluate, but I want you also to check if you're hiding. If you start consuming everything so that you're so well informed so that you can mitigate risk, guess what? You're consuming that so you could feel differently. You want to feel confident or self-assured, that reading is not going to make you feel confident or self-assured. It's your thoughts about what you're reading that's going to make you feel confident or self-assured. How are you going to put that, those that reading, which you could argue is data, right? How are you going to put that into your actions and what you're going to do next? What makes you confident is knowing that you can get through that negative feeling, even if it feels pretty horrific, and get to the other side. And the more that I know that I can do something, fail, and recover, the more I can process that and get back at it. Confidence comes from doing lots of reps. Staying safe does not grow your career or expand your leadership capabilities. It does not get you noticed. It does not help you feel accomplished or grow your expertise. And if you've never tried something before, guess what? Aspects of that aren't going to work. Again, that's data. You get to choose how you want to move forward. All right, friends, to recap, I want you to think about how you want to think about failure. I encourage you to spend some time, do a deep dive, look at the highlights, the lowlights. What would you do again? You get to think about all aspects of it. Don't keep yourself small and play safe by consuming so many articles and research papers about what I should do differently, right? I want you to pause, get clear on the opportunities, the relationships, the collaboration, and decide what you're going to do based on the data that you're seeing. Right. When you continue to revisit this, this is where you get to grow from your experience. All right. I want to hear from you. You know, email me at hello at JillGriffincoaching.com and tell me what you think. Tell me how you are managing failure. And as always, I want you to stay positive. Share this with a colleague. If this was helpful, share it with others. Let them also understand a different approach to failure. So be curious and always, always, always be kind. All right. I'll see you soon. Thanks.