Verified by 
Key points
- At the heart of anxiety is the double helix of uncertainty and threat.
- Avoiding the big challenges in life is not only doomed to fail but also is guaranteed to make life a tepid and anemic slog.
- When you’ve experienced repeated failures and continue to pick yourself up and move forward, confidence emerges.
Jeff’s eyes narrowed under his mop of red hair. Tension coiled like a compressed spring in every muscle of his body. Sunlight from the water below reflected up and danced across the boy’s skinny frame in dappled patterns of gold. Nervously licking his lips, he sighed, “I can’t do it. Let’s just forget the whole stupid thing and go home.”
His friend, two years older, was having none of it. “No, Jeff; we’re not going home. Not yet, anyways. All you’ve been talking about is how this is the summer you’ll make the jump off old Beetle Butt Rock. You saw me do it; now it’s your turn. Time to man up, Jeff.” Waiting for a second, his friend added, “You’re gonna have to wear your big boy pants today…they may not fit at first…” he stopped to suppress a laugh, “but I suspect you’ll grow into 'em in time.”
“Shut up, Cliff,” the younger boy replied, more as a plea than a command. “I’m 10 years old and I don’t need to man up for another three or four years at least. That’s a fact. I read it somewhere.”
Cliff laughed—the sort of friendly, dismissive laugh that older friends seem to perfect when they are children. “Sure thing, Jeff. Bet you read that on the back of your stupid Marvel comics.”
“Tell you what,” Cliff eventually responded with a thoughtful tone. “You’re not going to die from jumping off this ledge. It’s only 10 feet up from the water. And you already saw me swimming around the spot you’ll be jumping into….I checked, and there aren’t any hidden rocks. Just like there aren’t any crocodiles, alligators, mermaids, or sharks, for that matter.”
“The only animal that’s causing you trouble is that chicken that keeps clucking inside your head. Once you jump, let me tell you, that bird won’t make a peep.”
Jeff took a deep breath, started to say something, but thought better of it, and quietly sat down next to his friend. The heat of the day was beginning to rise, and the sun beat down on their shoulders with a familiar and comforting sting. Buzzing somewhere overhead was a dragonfly, and the smell of BBQ wafted out from the shoreline.
Suddenly Jeff bolted upright and stood clenching his fist. His rapid breathing sounded like a steam engine gaining momentum. Then, without uttering a word, he leaped from the boulder, legs and arms akimbo, falling silent as a turtle, but not half so gracefully, into the green water below.
A moment later Jeff resurfaced and let out a triumphant scream, his face beaming with delight.
The "coming of age" jump from the boulder had not gone exactly according to plan, but the main thing that needed to happen had indeed happened. A 10-year-old boy had faced his fears and learned that doing so, even imperfectly, did wonders to build his confidence and rob anxiety of its power to control him.
The Nature of Anxiety Giving Clues on How to Defeat It
At the heart of anxiety is the double helix of uncertainty and threat.
Uncertainty is, for the most part, focused on whether one can deal with whatever situation has galvanized the anxiety. Do you have the ability to succeed, and, if you don’t prevail, do you have the ability to pick yourself up and move on in life none the worse for wear?
The greater one’s uncertainty, the more one’s anxiety is likely to rise.
The threat aspect, not surprisingly, is focused on what might happen if you cannot successfully face some challenging situation, crisis, or event. That is, what might be the result of failure? As a general rule, the greater the cost of failure, the greater the anxiety.
Some people try to resolve anxiety by building up their ability to solve whatever challenges may come their way.
Others deal with anxiety by minimizing the chance that they will be forced to face any threatening challenges.
Neither of these is, by themselves, a realistic solution. No one can build enough skills to be ready to face any possible challenge. And avoiding the big challenges in life is not only doomed to fail but also is 100-percent guaranteed to make life a tepid and anemic slog through each day of the week.
Adventure requires risk, so a life devoted to avoiding risk is a life that lacks adventure.
The road less traveled is that which focuses on building one’s ability to rebound from failure. It requires building a perspective that responds confidently when asked, “What if I’m not up to that challenge just yet, and it all comes crashing down…can I get up, dust myself off, being better for having attempted it, and keep going?”
When you’ve experienced repeated failures and continue to pick yourself up and move forward, confidence emerges. This confidence is rooted in “successfully failing”—in coming to deeply know “I’m tough enough to fail and still keep moving forward.”
Failures as the Fuel for Confidence
No one succeeds 100 percent of the time. Some of us have much better records of success than others, but even the best do not always hit the mark.
As a consequence, we know that failure comes to visit everyone from time to time. Some people respond to failure with great anguish. If they experience repeated failures in a brief period of time, they become dejected and drained of all confidence.
Others, however, respond to repeated failure with growing self-assurance and certitude about their future. For these people, failure has been a boon, a push in the right direction. It crystallized a recognition that failure does not define them, nor does it act as a final pronouncement on their worth.
Despite differences in how adults respond to failure, nearly everyone is born with a robust capacity for resilience. This is easily seen by considering the approach toddlers take to mastering basic skills.
For instance, when first learning how to walk, toddlers will fall about 69 times an hour. By age two, this goes down to 38 times a day.
Which of us, when faced with failing 69 times each hour, would persist at the task for more than a day or two? But toddlers eagerly and tenaciously push forward, happily getting up each time they fall.
Perhaps that seems unrealistic to you. And, yet, as a toddler, this is what you did.
What’s more, as a toddler, you did this not only with regard to learning to walk but while also striving to acquire numerous other skills at the same time (learning to talk, developing self-care skills, etc.). In each of these areas of development, you at first failed more times than you succeeded.
The world of toddlers is a world of tenacious overachievers. Were any adult to demonstrate this type of grit in the face of repeated failures, he or she would be held up as a role model.
The Take-Away
The thing to learn from this is that an important key to dealing with failure (and the fear of failure) is to put it in perspective. Is it something from which you can recover, learn from, and grow stronger for having experienced?
If you’ve had some healthy experiences with failure as a teen or young adult, your answer will likely be "yes." If you’ve not had these healthy experiences, then you really need to arrange for them.
Yes, you read that correctly. You need to arrange to have some failures that you can learn from. That means you need to take some chances. You need to risk experiencing setbacks and losses that genuinely push you.
Those that cause you to wince, but not back away…where you push back against the pain of having failed and continue to make the most of life.
Those experiences, over time, lead to greater confidence and peace of mind in the face of uncertainty. This frame of mind does not come cheaply, however, and it does not arise by chance. Instead, it is hammered out on the anvil of repeated setbacks from which you invariably pick yourself up and press forward in life.
But, like most hard-won victories, the rewards are immense. The number of doors that then become available for you to open and explore what lies beyond makes it well worth the effort.
