How to Stop Projecting Past Failures onto Future Opportunities

The reality hits you when you realize that it’s not the failure that you avoid in life, but you just don’t like the sound of it. Do you remember the despair and the sadness when things didn’t go well last time? The business that failed to make a mark? The relationship that broke your heart? The time that you invested hundreds of hours in some project, but it never worked out. This kind of thing happens with every one of us.

The fear of failure is quite common. It’s often projected as if it’s an easy task to get rid of but the problem is, it’s like a dragon to slay. The dragon is already dead and buried but its ghost keeps coming back again and again.

Let me tell you about a friend whom I met a couple of years back. He was a smart guy who had built a successful business but then his business suffered a loss due to some unavoidable circumstances. This time, when he started the new business, he was finding ways to tear it apart. He’d tell himself, “Last time I went all in. I lost two years of my life. I emptied my savings. This time, I can’t take that risk again.” These are similar voices that we hear often. Sometimes from our near and dear ones. And sometimes it’s our own voice.

The embarrassment that we normally feel when things don’t work out, whether it’s a business, a career, or relationships. That embarrassment haunts us for years. Even when everything is fine in our life. And in doing so, we often miss out on new opportunities. It’s not the event that causes such limiting beliefs. It’s the feeling. Once that feeling comes, it’s like the feeling is forever there. And every new chance is viewed through the same dirty lens.

Your brain prefers to hurt you in many different ways.

I always think about this idea. We often pretend that our mind is after happiness. As if it’s some achievement that we need to chase. It’s not the case at all. The mind is primarily interested in knowing what’s going to happen next. Even if it’s bad, still that’s what it needs to know. For the mind, known pain is much more comforting than an unknown potential gain, for example. Hence, people remain in the same emotional cycle for years, complaining all the time and never getting out of it.

Our nervous system is quite smart to learn the pattern and use it for its own survival. Whenever we feel that pattern in our life, it gets registered in the inner brain. The next time, the brain tries to make sure you don’t go through the same pattern again. On the outside, we might just crack a joke about the failure. Tell ourselves that it’s not a big deal but deep inside, in our subconscious, we still feel embarrassed and sad even if it’s years later.

The brain enters into a protection mode. It thinks that a disaster is waiting to happen and it sends out warnings to your nervous system. It’s not because it’s smart or wise, but because it doesn’t want to feel hurt. Once again, the same way it did the last time. The funny thing is, the brain cannot differentiate between protection and self-sabotage. It’s not being realistic. It’s not trying to learn anything new. It’s just fear this time.

Failure is not an event, but it’s who you are.

Failure is like that silent killer. Failure is not a sign of being a bad entrepreneur if a business fails. Failure is also not a sign of being unloved because you had one bad breakup. It’s not a sign of being a fundamentally broken person if you had one public disappointment. However, the wound that it creates can be deep enough to create havoc. Whenever you fail, it’s not something that has happened to you. It becomes a thing of who you are. So, we often hear a saying where people call other people failures. I mean, failure sometimes can become a tag for some people. And of course, it’s not right.

More than normal average people, failure hits hard on intelligent people. Because for them, their expectations are high. They’re good at envisioning things and calculating if things could go wrong. They would simulate all the different variations of how things might go wrong, and then they try to make sure that everything is fine and perfect.

Without knowing it, self-awareness can become hypervigilance. You will play out all the possible awkwardness in your mind even before it has happened. You’ll find every exit route as if there’s going to be a fire and you need to find a way out. You will make sure that this time things are different and things don’t go wrong like the last time. But in doing so, there will be a day when you’ll find yourself in a world where every opportunity will sound like a threat.

Sometimes failure is not what you’re afraid of, but it’s hope.

When I first understood this concept, I realized that some of us might not be afraid of our failures, but of that hope where we feel that could might be broken. That’s what makes us self-sabotage.

Hope often makes us weak in that sense. It opens us up. As soon as you allow yourself to think that something good could happen to you, you are practically in danger of crashing at it once again. It does appear silly but it is what it is.

A lot of us would prefer to stay numb. They will be armored with realism. They will care less about that new business or that new relationship. Or, they will be half invested so that this time, if it doesn’t work out, then they don’t get hurt as much as it caused the last time. Basically, what it means is, when you don’t try it out, the fall is not as bad. Well, that’s the theory, at least.

When you start living like this, then loneliness starts creeping in. Life becomes boring. You don’t see colors. You are mostly disappointed at every single thing. It practically sucks the life out of you.

The body is not a place where logic is applied.

Whenever I’m discussing this with people who are self-sabotaging by projecting past failures onto future opportunities, they do understand it. In their mind, they get my words perfectly. But their body, it’s a different game altogether. Your nervous system doesn’t give a damn about your logical analysis. Positive thinking doesn’t work here.

Affirmations and the hustle culture podcasts that you listen to are not going to make your body trust you. The problem is, the emotional memory is stored in that body. Your body is not the enemy at the same time. It’s just attempting to prevent you from getting hurt once again. And by body, I mean your nervous system. It’s basically just like an operating system that has not been updated. You need to update the operating system for it to start acting on the newfound knowledge that you have learned.

Do not take old failures for granted.

The biggest mistake you can make is thinking about your failures again and again. It’s like scratching your old wound. So, the wound never heals. It becomes permanent. Do not relive the pain. It just makes the pain even deeper. It keeps you in the same place. You might tell yourself some story that I’m trying to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, and hence I need to be careful. But it’s not the case. You’ve done that long back. Repeating it won’t solve the issue. It just makes the issue worse. There’s a difference between being careful and being paralyzed because of fear of the uncertain.

Let the new you blossom.

Your mind is always trying to make comparisons. It’s always trying to identify the patterns, recognize the loopholes, and find the red flags.

Just be aware of what your mind is doing. You are not your mind. You are the awareness. Identify all the fears, all the doubts as an awareness. As if you are outside the body, watching the mind. As if the mind is a child that needs to be constantly monitored.

Understand and teach your child, which is your mind, that not all sensations are a danger. Sometimes being uncomfortable without any assurances, without any guarantees, is perfectly okay. There’s no amount of healing that will remove uncertainty. We’re never ever trying to heal uncertainty from our life. It’s a part of it. It’s natural. It’s okay for the future to be uncertain.

Just start to recall that you have gone through the whole process before and you have made it work before it fell apart. But for a brief moment of time, you made it work. That memory often hides the fact that things actually worked in your favor. That memory, if you try to recall it when things went well, before it finally fell apart, the part before will give you strength and confidence. It will not take away the fear entirely, but it will give you perspective. It’ll make your fear manageable.