Fear of Failure- A big hurdle for Success

 

“Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.” —Jack Canfield

 Failure is good, fear of failure is not good at all. When you start on a journey of accomplishing something, the chances of success, as well as failure, is 50%. However, if you fear the failure at the start of the journey, the chances of success come down. This is applicable in every field, be it studies, starting a new business, or in trading.

If you are starting something new and you fear the failure, it is better not to start it. The good approach will be, you take a pause, understand your fears, work on overcoming them, and then start. If you are low in confidence and still have fear of failure, you tend to make more mistakes.

In this article, I am going to talk about the fear of failure and what you can do to overcome it.

What are the reasons for FEAR?

1. Lack of confidence - The worst decision you can make is to start something with low confidence. Why are we low in confidence? The answer is point 2.

2. Lack of understanding about that activity - There is only one reason why you are low in confidence - the lack of knowledge or information in whatever you are doing. This leads to the third point.

3. Less capability to manage the situation - If you don't have enough knowledge on whatever you are doing, you are not aware of challenges that can come ahead and you will always be fearful of the future.

4. Lack of experience - If you don't have enough experience in what you are doing, you will always be fearful.

Let us sum up the reasons of fear with an example - You heard from your friend about the 20% profit he made in the stock market in the last one month and you got fascinated by it and you want to start trading now with your savings. The idea was certainly exciting - 20% in a month and you straightaway jumped into it. You got tips from your friend on where to put money. Once you put your hard-earned money in the first trade – How confident will you be? Ask yourself before reading further. You will have low confidence because you are not sure of what you are doing nor do you have any experience – practical as well as theoretical. You will have a constant fear of losing the money.

Now consider a scenario, where you learned about trading by taking some course, you have studied all the possible scenarios which can occur when you trade and how experienced traders react to it. Will you fear failure? No. You may still fail but it will be not because of fear but because of situation or conditions which are beyond your control.

The moral of the story is – people look for shortcuts to success and there are none!!

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” —Albert Einstein

What you can do to overcome failure?

As discussed above, fear is mainly because you are not sure of what you are getting into. How can it be overcome? Here is the step by step process for it:

1. Define the Goal in detail - Just don't jump on to anything, whatever you are doing, you will have to define your goal. Just defining the goal won't help, you will need a definite goal. In trading, you cannot define a goal as - 'I want to make a profit.' You will have to define the profit - 'I want to make a 10% profit in my trades.'

2. Get the information or knowledge required to achieve this goal - Once you know your goal, it will be a lot easy in knowing in which direction to head i.e what all information and knowledge to get to increase the chances of success.

3. Start with small steps to build the capability through live experience - Learning is an ongoing process so you should never think that you are done with learning and go all gun blazing. Take small steps, apply all your learning in a live environment, see how it is going, and analyze the results. This will ensure that even if you fail, there is no major impact done.

4. The above steps will increase the confidence and since you will be learning from your own experience in every step, the learning is going to be with you for rest of your life.

With time, you will see the mistakes or failure percentage going down.

Why failure is important?

As I mentioned at the start of the article, fear of failure is bad and not a failure. In trading, you will fail and before you get started, just accept the fact. Here are a few reasons how failure can be advantageous to you:

• When you fail, you know what not to do and if you have to do the same thing again, you will do it differently which will inculcate creativity in you.
• Since you are also evaluating your failure, you will come to know if there is a particular habit of yours because of which you are failing. You get to learn about yourself.
• Life is like a sine wave, sometimes up and sometimes down. Failures prepare you for the down journey. If you are well prepared, you will rise stronger in the next cycle.

Let’s end the discussion by talking about fear in trading. Do you know why most people don't get success in trading? It is not because of the market or bad luck, it is mainly because of their fear. When you lose money in trading, instead of analyzing what went wrong, you start worrying about the next trade - what if I lose again? How will I recover what I have lost? You cannot afford to get into that zone. So focus on learning and executing your learning and not on the result. If your learning and execution are good, results will come automatically.

Have a profitable trading journey.

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Prem Sinha is a lifelong passionate learner and enthusiast of the Share market since 2003. He also guides other traders in their trading journey since 2010 through quality training programs & live trading clubs and mentoring traders to reduce their learning curve. 

His major areas of expertise are Price action based Technical analysis, Options strategies based on Option Greeks, customized Option strategies, Option trades management and Option portfolio management. He & his team have also explored and adopted some scientific techniques to handle psychological aspects of trading.

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