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 

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Jill Griffin, host of The Career Refresh, delivers expert guidance on workplace challenges and career transitions. Jill leverages her experience working for the world's top brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Hilton Hotels, and Martha Stewart to address leadership, burnout, team dynamics, and the 4Ps (perfectionism, people-pleasing, procrastination, and personalities).

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Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Hey there, welcome back.
I'm Jill Griffin, your host ofthe Career Refresh.
And today we are talking aboutfailure because I want to tell
you that failure used to wreckme, right?
It didn't matter if it was likea messed-up marketing campaign
or any of the times that I gotlaid off.
It was a spiral of anxiety, alittle bit of obsessive

(00:23):
thinking, and basically arguingwith reality like I actually had
a chance of winning theargument.
All of this was reallyunhelpful.
Sometimes I would freeze.
Sometimes I wanted to like kindof find a cashmere blanket and
an ottoman and just like bereally like soft and gentle with
myself, but refusing to moveforward.

(00:44):
And because it felt reallyscary, like I don't want to have
this experience again.
I don't want to be in thissituation again.
Look, I spent most of my careerin, you know, tech, health, uh,
ed tech, health tech, digitalmarketing, hospitality.
These are all extremelyfast-moving industries.
And when you're essentiallyliving like the stock market of

(01:05):
your own life, right?
You're in this high risk, highreward.
It can be totally exhilarating.
Except I was treating my entirecareer like I needed to flip a
coin because I didn't know if itwas going to be a signing bonus
or a severance package.
Was this accurate?
Yeah, kind of, maybe.
Was it helpful?
Not at all.

(01:26):
So the roller coaster becameexhausting, right?
I was tired all the time.
I was anxious.
And I was starting to feel likeI didn't exactly know what move
to make next.
And that was because I had tolearn how to rethink failure,
right?
I like to say like wear failurelike a loose garment.
And it doesn't, you don't wantit to like suffocate you.
You don't want to be dragging iteverywhere, but it also needs to

(01:48):
be looked at when you havefailures and thinking about what
do you need to do next.
And that's what I want to unpacktoday, right?
It's how flipping my thinking onfailure really helps me through
managing my brain and looking atthe data and knowing that
there's times where my brain isgoing to be a total jerk and
tell me stories.
And it doesn't mean it's true,even if in the moment it feels

(02:12):
true for me, right?
So most of us, if we get intoit, have an automatic resistance
to failure.
I mean, let's look at it.
Like it is when was the lasttime you had a big fail?
If you're thinking about thatfailure, take a pause, take a
beat.
What is it?
Is it stress?
Is it fear?
Is it anxiety?
Is it that like foreboding dreadand just sort of like, oh gosh,

(02:36):
what's going to happen?
And that's because what I'velearned is that so much of what
we think about failure wasdrilled to us in our schooling,
right?
If you got the answer wrong, youfailed.
If you failed the test, youfailed.
If you fail enough times, guesswhat?
You're going to be held back oryou're going to have to have
some sort of remedial support inorder to get you to move

(02:59):
forward.
And that ends up burning reallybright in our psyche.
My clients tell me they havethis experience too, that we're
we're in this phase of like, ohmy God, failure is so bad.
And we're wired to believe thatfailure is always going to feel
off-road.
And I'm going to hear and tellyou, as someone who has been
both an employee and now I'mnine years self-employed in

(03:20):
entrepreneurial ship, failure isreally what's getting me to my
success.
So just hear me out before youjudge, right?
It's just becomes one less wayof what's going to work and
what's not going to work.
And the faster you learn to riffon failure, the faster you're
going to start seeing resultsand seeing different results and

(03:41):
seeing success.
So if you quit or freeze, thereis 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, theremay be some failures.
And in your failures, there mayalso be some successes.
So what I'm simply suggesting islike, let's just slow down a

(04:04):
little bit, right?
Maybe you celebrate yoursuccesses, but you don't reflect
on why it worked.
And most of us weren't trainedto analyze unless we worked in
sort of data-drivenenvironments.
So one, I'm going to tell youwhen you have a failure, get the
data.
These are the facts.
What do we know?
It could be hardcore facts, itcould be people, places, and

(04:25):
things.
It's the data that we want.
Next, I want you to look at thatdata and choose how you want to
think about it, right?
You get to sit in the suckinessand the grossness of that
failure if you want to.
Or you can look at the data anddecide, you know what, based on
this information, what do I wantto do next?

(04:46):
I'm not telling you not toprocess the failure.
If you have disappointment, youmay need to sit, you may need to
process, you may need reallyfeel the disappointment of that,
especially if it's grief about,let's say, like the loss of a
job or the loss of anopportunity.
You need to do that.
That is not what I'm talkingabout in this episode.
I am talking about when we arequickly to achieve or we've sent

(05:07):
out a bunch of job interviews, abunch of resumes for job
interviews, and we've gonethrough a couple of rounds, and
then we don't get the job or notthe candidate.
Yeah, that might feel reallysucky.
But is there something to learnalong the way?
Is there something that we canlook at about how we're learning
to get an opportunity or land ajob in this current marketplace?
That's where your wins are,right?

(05:28):
The thing that we used to dowhen I worked full time in tech
was we would call it the wallow,and we would start dissecting
why something worked or why itdidn't.
And I mean, the name alone,wallow, could make you want to
puke or like shudder, right?
But it was time to capture allthe learnings.
It was okay to be uncomfortable.
This was not a time for fingerpointing.

(05:50):
It was not a time foraccusations.
We were investigatingeverything.
We were looking at thehighlights, the lowlights.
And if this happened again, whatwould we do next time?
Our tendency is often to jumpright into what didn't work, the
lowlights, right?
What went wrong, what we woulddo differently, how can we
prevent this from ever happeningagain?
Right?
That's a totally different vibethan saying, okay, yeah, we need

(06:12):
to look at what didn't work, butlet's also equally spend the
time on what did work.
And when we did that, we startto 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, startingto dig in the data and knowing

(06:32):
that the data is just data, it'sjust facts.
You can spin and prove almostanything you want looking at
data.
But I want you to look at thedata, know that you're going to
have some thoughts about thedata.
And I want you to really thinklike, are these thoughts
creating positive feelings ornegative feelings?
I don't want you to blame thedata.

(06:53):
I don't want you to celebratethe data.
I just want you to look at yourthoughts around the data.
And then that's where you get todecide intentionally with a lens
of confidence and empowermentwhat you are going to do next,
right?
This is the kind of work that Ioften suggest you do, like as
you're getting ready in themorning, if there was something

(07:13):
that you need to process fromthe day before, really thinking
through.
Like, I'm not going to blame thedata, I'm not going to celebrate
the data.
I'm going to look at the dataand 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 throughin the meeting that's coming up,
in that job interview, in thatconversation?
How am I going to use this datato move myself forward?

(07:36):
Look, our thoughts about thedata are going to create our
feelings.
And as I've said before, ifyou're a longtime listener, you
know that everything we do inlife is because of a feeling we
want or because of a feeling wewant to avoid.
There are no exceptions.
So success comes fromcontinually examining our
thoughts, looking at ourfeelings, and then deciding if

(07:58):
this is serving me or not andwhat I want to do next.
It really is simple.
And I'm telling you, I fail alot, probably more than I win,
but I keep at it.
And I'd say nine years post mycorporate job, my wins are big.
I still have failures.
I still have regular failures,but I keep looking at the data

(08:18):
and then I make a decision and Iget back out there and I try
something again.
So I'd offer you what it wouldfeel like if you separated your
feelings on failure from thefacts and you just looked at the
data.
Would it give you relief?
Or calm?
Would you feel curious?
A thought that I would offer youto think through is how can you

(08:40):
put your thoughts around thedata into the future tense?
I'm willing to learn from mymistakes.
There might be successes insidethis failure, and I'm willing to
take a look.
If I don't look now, I'll neverknow.
Right.
I don't want you to hide fromthe data.
So many clients tell me thatafter a failure, they either

(09:03):
hide, right?
They don't want to look at it,they don't want to look at
something like this in theirbank account, right?
It's the that type ofequivalent.
Or what they also might do isthey start reading and watching
and studying and trying tofigure out what to do.
And yeah, again, I want you toevaluate, but I want you also to
check if you're hiding.

(09:24):
If you start consumingeverything so that you're so
well informed so that you canmitigate risk, guess what?
You're consuming that so youcould feel differently.
You want to feel confident orself-assured, that reading is
not going to make you feelconfident or self-assured.
It's your thoughts about whatyou're reading that's going to

(09:44):
make you feel confident orself-assured.
How are you going to put that,those that reading, which you
could argue is data, right?
How are you going to put thatinto your actions and what
you're going to do next?
What makes you confident isknowing that you can get through
that negative feeling, even ifit feels pretty horrific, and
get to the other side.

(10:05):
And the more that I know that Ican do something, fail, and
recover, the more I can processthat and get back at it.
Confidence comes from doing lotsof reps.
Staying safe does not grow yourcareer or expand your leadership
capabilities.
It does not get you noticed.
It does not help you feelaccomplished or grow your
expertise.

(10:25):
And if you've never triedsomething before, guess what?
Aspects of that aren't going towork.
Again, that's data.
You get to choose how you wantto move forward.
All right, friends, to recap, Iwant you to think about how you
want to think about failure.
I encourage you to spend sometime, do a deep dive, look at
the highlights, the lowlights.
What would you do again?
You get to think about allaspects of it.

(10:48):
Don't keep yourself small andplay safe by consuming so many
articles and research papersabout what I should do
differently, right?
I want you to pause, get clearon the opportunities, the
relationships, thecollaboration, and decide what
you're going to do based on thedata that you're seeing.
Right.
When you continue to revisitthis, this is where you get to

(11:08):
grow from your experience.
All right.
I want to hear from you.
You know, email me at hello atJillGriffincoaching.com and tell
me what you think.
Tell me how you are managingfailure.
And as always, I want you tostay positive.
Share this with a colleague.
If this was helpful, share itwith others.
Let them also understand adifferent approach to failure.
So be curious and always,always, always be kind.

(11:30):
All right.
I'll see you soon.
Thanks.