Breaking Free: Overcome Fear of Failure and Unleash Success

Hey, my friends, you have to listen to this.

I'm absolutely stunned by this 2024 report called the Entrepreneurship Reality Check from the GEM, which is the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. And they told us a heartbreaking statistic, which says 49% of people surveyed said they would not start a business due to the fear of failing. 49%. And that has risen from the 44% in 2019. Wow. I mean, just imagine what opportunities are being lost due to the fear of failing. That is absolutely crazy.

Understandable. But my friends, as you will soon find out, the fear of failure is absolutely unnecessary. Now, I know that the fear of failure can feel absolutely terrifying. And let's be honest, the fear of failure can run your life like a bad CEO. It can hijack your thoughts, it can fuel stress, and it convinces you to run your business from fear instead of from freedom. One of my coaching clients recently said, it feels like I'm riding a roller

coaster blindfolded. I never know when I'm about to drop, spiral, or completely lose control. And if that sounds familiar to you, then you are definitely in the right place. Because today I'm going to share with you something that no one is talking about when it comes to the fear of failure. And once you get it, you will never see any type of fear the same way again.

Now, I kind of wish that I knew what I'm about to share with you back in 2005, because the fear of failure nearly ruined my business and brought me to my knees. Because it was only a year before, when I was traveling up towards London to a well-paid job that gave me certainty, gave me a guaranteed income, but it felt like it was draining my soul away. And the shocker for me was it was Monday and I was already wishing it was Friday.

And that sent a shiver of fear through me. What was I doing to wish my life away like that? And in that moment, I made a promise, a commitment to myself, to finally jump ship and create my own business. Which was terrifying, but I did. And at first, it was very exciting to be my own boss. But that thrill soon turned into gut-wrenching fear as I struggled to bring in consistent income. I was terrorized by thoughts like, what if I can't pay my rent? What if I end up homeless?

What if I have to ask people to bail me out? Do you know what? These thoughts felt so real. And what made it worse was that I'd just recovered from an anxiety disorder. And I was terrified that I was going to head back down the same path of panic attacks and crippling self-doubt and shame. And it got to the point where I even considered calling my old company to ask for my job back. But thankfully, I never made that call.

And in this episode, I'm going to share what helped me. Welcome to the Ultimate Mindset Change Podcast. I am your mindset coach and host, Paul Shepard, and I'm on a mission to help you liberate yourself from the limitations of your mind so you can create your next level of success. If you're new here, well, this might be the best introduction to my work ever. So hit subscribe and make 2025 one of your most successful, most fulfilling years yet.

This episode is for everyone. I am focusing on the business and career world, but what I'm about to share with you applies to any area of your life where you are struggling with the fear of failure. That can be sport, it can be socializing, it can be relationships, parenting, and creativity. Use the philosophy and strategies wherever they are applicable. Are you ready for a truth bomb about the fear of failure? Here's something I discovered through years of experimenting and exploring my mind.

You don't actually have a fear of failure. That's right. You just believe you do. Just let that sink in for a moment. You don't actually have a fear of failure.

You just believe you do Now you might be a bit confused Resistant Or even think I've gone crazy But listen carefully Because this is where everything will change for you, Your fear of failure isn't real. No matter how it feels, no matter what the content is that appears inside your head, it's just a thought recording. And your ego has taken painful past experiences of failing and rejection and turned them into predictions. Your ego is a brain process that creates predictions.

It takes your past, uses it to assess the present moment, and also creates predictions for your future. And those predictions can look like, I'm going to lose my wife and kids, I'm going to lose that big contract, and then my business will crash and burn. I won't be able to cope if things go wrong. And these dramatic mental movies play out and trigger all sorts of reactive behavior to try to control a future which doesn't even exist. And as these movies play in your mind.

Your consciousness gets pulled right into those movies and you go into this autopilot trance, fully absorbed, and you're acting out those fear-based scenarios as if they are your reality, even though they don't exist. And you know that. You know this deep down. That knot in your stomach, the racing heart, the sweaty palms, it all happens because you've suddenly been drawn into living inside a mental simulation, just like the movie The Matrix.

But that simulation, as it was in the movie, isn't even real, because it's based on a future that doesn't and cannot even exist. Your ego is simply making it up, and you are buying into it.

You even try to make reality fit the simulation inside your mind and you even get very disappointed if reality doesn't match the simulation inside your mind how crazy is that come on my friends you have to wake up you have to begin to pivot yourself away from the ego And those mental simulations, those thought recordings, cannot exist and impact you the way that they do when you bring your full attention back to the most important moment of your life, the here and now.

Picture your mind like a steel pond. When thoughts race and emotions swirl from your fears, it's as if someone is constantly stirring the water and the mud rises. Everything becomes cloudy and confused, and you can get lost inside an anxious dream. But when you stop stirring, when you simply sit in presence and let things settle, the mud begins to sink. The water clears. And suddenly, clarity and insight and calm begin to rise to the surface.

And you will realize for yourself that your fears, your thoughts of failing, were never really the problem. It was the constant stirring, the constant engagement that hid the truth.

And realizing this changed everything for me. It was tough at first. I didn't quite get that thoughts were not reality. And I would fall into a trance and then find myself as the main actor in a very dramatic and catastrophic mind movie. But with practice, patience and perseverance the fear lost its grip. And now I see those thoughts for what they are. Illusions I don't have to believe. Thoughts I do not have to be held prisoner by.

And that shift? Well, that shift helped me build a successful business and grow an audience of hundreds of thousands of people across various platforms. I get to coach the most incredible entrepreneurs and people around the world. I even coach coaches to do the same thing too. Because I'm no longer held back by thoughts of failure.

I'm creating a business from a place of joy and adventure instead. And that is available for you. And I want to ask you, what success would you create if you no longer believed your thoughts of failure? Now, I was coaching online a client in the States recently who was terrified they were going to lose their business and their home because of the fear of failure getting out of control.

They were losing their entrepreneurial edge and spirit and now were second-guessing everything which was driving them mad. Where are these thoughts of failing? I asked them. In my head, he said, I can see myself losing everything. Oh, crikey, I said. In your head? Yes, he said, it's in my head. How does it look? I asked. Terrifying, he said. Makes me go all hot and sweaty. And you can see them right now? Yes, he said. And then what happens when you pivot your full attention away

from these thoughts and become fully present with me? I'm not there. Okay, so where did they go? I've no idea, he responded. I asked him to look at them again. Yeah, there they are. Oh, and they feel awful. Okay, so what does that tell you? I'm not sure. Maybe I should stop looking at the garbage in my head? Well, that sounds like a plan. Then why don't you stop looking at the garbage in your head? He looked at me and said, to be honest, I didn't even know it was an option.

So I asked him again to bring those fears of failing into his mind, and what I want you to do is just simply stare at them stare at them without judgment, without attachment as just recordings from the past trying to predict the future, let those thoughts be there, label them as an old program breathe slow and low just let them be there and if you can Just notice the huge amount of space that surrounds those thoughts. And if your mind wanders, bring it back and stare at those thoughts.

So he did this for a couple of minutes. And then he said, they actually seem a bit boring now. I can't hold on to them. They keep drifting away. They're becoming see-through. They actually feel irrelevant.

Good i said because they actually are they're not even yours he looked at me a bit confused and said what do you mean i said well how long do you think you've been carrying this fear around with you he said well probably since school maybe when i was around nine not wanting to fail from my dad. So this was a fear that was given to him by the expectation of his father. I said, how old are you now? He said, 40. I said, you've been carrying this for over 30 years. Let it go,

my friend. Just let it go. Stop staring at the garbage in your head and come back out here to reality. You cannot afford to create your business from an anxious dream you've been carrying for over 30 years so together we did some work we repeated the exercise in a variety of ways and we also did some devaluing of those recordings and the fear and I said this to him and I will say it to you too.

Trying to create your business from a distracted mind full of garbage is absolutely crazy and it can doom your business to failure like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wake your mind up and practice the art of creating your success from a powerful place of presence instead. I promise you, it will be the best investment and gift you could ever give yourself.

Now, there is naturally some resistance. You might be asking, is it really as simple as pivoting your attention away from the ego and into the now? Surely, I need to get to the root cause. Surely I need to trawl through those childhood memories of rejection or the issues I had with school or parents. And I would say, yes, you can absolutely do that if you want to. It can be really helpful to know where these patterns began.

But let's be honest, that process, as I discovered, can take months or years. You can become hooked into digging into the past, hoping an insight, a revelation will set you free. Over-focusing on your past can be a distraction from creating success in your business. And it can keep you in a trap of trying to fix yourself. So remind yourself of this gross analogy. How long are you going to keep picking at that bloody scab before you finally leave it alone?

And if digging around looking for insights from the past as to why we behave the way we do worked we would all be fearless by now and the biggest changes I have seen in my life and my clients lives is when we broke the addiction to obsessing about the past and staring at the thoughts inside our head as if they were reality and moved our energy and focus onto creating a life we loved instead. Let me show you something. If you're in a car driving, you might want to do this exercise a little later.

But I'd like you to think about a fear of failure that you've been struggling with. And notice how easy it is for your mind to pull you in. Some of you might be very visual, might have a strong feeling. You might have an auditory experience where you can hear voices, maybe yours or someone else's. And just notice the impact it has on you. Now move your attention to your breath. Take a nice big deep breath in through your nose. Feel your belly expand.

And as you breathe slowly out through your mouth like you're blowing through a straw, notice the pause at the end of the breath. And breathe normally now in through the nose, but keep it slow and low to relax your nervous system. Feel your feet on the floor. Listen to the sound of my voice and take a good look around you at all that you can see. The colors, the shadows, the shapes. And let me ask you, where is that fear now?

Now that fear will have gone because you've moved your attention from inside your mind to out into physical reality.

Your fear can't exist when your attention is fully present it only survives when your consciousness is drifting into the past or future inside your mind and i invite you again to ensure that your full attention is listening to the sound of my voice, and I wonder if you can sense that right here, right now, that you have everything you need, and that right here, right now there are no problems for you to solve, and how does that feel?

Your mind might wander to a story of responsibility or a fear but if you bring it back to this very present moment you have everything you need this very second. And right here right now there's no problems to solve how does that feel and can you sense what is possible for you when you break free from the stories of your mind. Possible for you to create from the here and now. Can you sense anything is possible?

Can you sense what's available to you when you stop staring at the nonsense inside your head? I'm hoping you can feel that it's all possible for you. And if you can't, don't worry. The more you practice, the more you might get a sense of what is truly available to you. Keep practicing. And neuroscience backs up what I'm saying too. When your default mode network, which is often called the home of the ego, is overactive, it will pull you into loops of overthinking, regret, and imagined futures.

And this is very common in today's overstimulated world, where constant busyness, digital distractions, and unresolved stress keeps our minds trapped in narratives of the past and fears about what's next.

But when we practice presence, we begin to deactivate the default mode network, and we shift towards the central executive network, which enhances focus, decision-making, and problem-solving.

Simultaneously the salience network begins to help you prioritize what truly matters into tuning into what's meaningful right now and the result we become more intuitive grounded and creative able to respond from clarity instead of reacting from fear presence isn't just peaceful it's neurologically powerful. With more practice. And this is how you become super conscious, your true self.

You'll naturally just feel more grounded, more intuitive, more clear, more creative, more confident, more energized. And it's nothing mystical. It's not woo woo. It feels a little magical with the synchronicities that you're drawn to, but it is just you that's undistracted. And you've met this version of you before. You know when clarity hits you in the shower, when insights drop during a walk, and when ideas seem to flow on a holiday.

And that moment when your mind just stops and you can feel a natural peace begin to arise. But most of you fully can access it because you're too distracted by the noise, by the stress, by a world screaming for your attention. Emails, messages, social media, family, business fires for you to put out, doom scrolling. It can feel endless.

And when it gets too much, we reach for the comfort food, the drink, the screens, the scrolling, the porn, gambling, any type of distraction to numb the overwhelm. But as you know, these aren't sustainable. And what you truly crave is inner peace, a calm mind, a clear channel. And I joke with my clients that I'm on a mission to make inner peace sexy again. And it really has this negative, boring perception, which inner peace is anything but.

Because you can create a business from that sort of adrenaline-based fear, or you can create your business from a place of inner peace, joy, excitement, and adventure. The choice is yours. It's amazing to see the results clients create from being more super conscious, from creating from that place of inner peace.

And I would love you to do the same too. And to do that, if you want true success in business, life, love, health, wherever, you've got to stop building from fear and you have to stop staring at the rubbish inside your head. Start building from a place of inner peace and the power of presence. And the more time you spend doing that, the more you'll access your super conscious and that's where your best decisions will come from. you'll trust yourself again on a whole new level.

That's where your confidence will grow in ways it never has done before, because that's where your fear of failure will become irrelevant.

This is why this podcast and my coaching exist, to help you quieten the noise in your mind and reconnect with the real you. When people say to me, Paul, what do you do? I like to reply now, I help people be more themselves than they've ever been. So here's a quick mini summary. If you find yourself drawn into fear-based thoughts of failure, know they're false. They are illusions, mental movies that you don't have to stare at. Acknowledge they are there and just let them go.

Take a breath. Come back to this very present moment and let your mind settle. Let your super consciousness speak from within you. If this podcast episode resonated with you, and I hope it has, leave me a comment. Let me know your thoughts. Ask me your questions. Or let me know what you'd love me to cover next. And if you're ready to take your mindset to the next level, reach out. My coaching details are in the show's description.

But if you're thinking, I want to go deeper right now, then check out the Awakening Meditation or the How to Stop Overthinking Forever episodes to keep the momentum going. The links to both of these episodes are in the show's description. Again, thank you for listening and I hope you have a wonderful, peaceful and present day.