Overcoming Fear

More than likely, many of you have been enjoying watching US athletes compete in the 2008 Olympics that concluded just yesterday. Our athletes have made us proud, not only in the victories they achieved, but in the gracious way they handled defeat.

Particularly intriguing to me are the athletes who competed at Olympic level previously, had a break in their Olympic completion in 2004, and somehow made it back to the 2008 Games to compete again. Some even won medals. Amazing!

I say this because of the multitude of obstacles that could have prevented their participation in 2008. Age, injuries, sufficient time to train, etc., are only a few of the many good reasons for not competing. I suspect another must have been fear of failure. Even great athletes wrestle with this enemy, and oftentimes the enemy wins.

Fear of failure has relevance for veterans. Many veterans have completed heroic service in the military, only to find themselves stymied by fear of failure once they transition into civilian life. This fear can be crippling to the point that vets give up in such critical areas as marriage, parenting, education, health, employment, or in pursuing a life-long dream. I suspect that there are multiplied thousands who live under this fear and never live up to their potential.

Could one of these vets be you? If fear of failure ceased to be a factor in your life, is there something you would choose to pursue? If this is your situation, let me encourage you to step out and overcome your fear. You have overcome fear of failure in many areas of your life previously. You can certainly do it again.

In the 1980’s my family was invited to eat dinner with a vet and his family who lived in Alton, Missouri. This vet had been a Marine in the Viet Nam war and had lost both legs due to a booby trap. When we drove up to house, we saw a most amazing thing. The vet was on top of his roof laying shingles. He was roofing his home entirely by himself. I would not have believed except I saw it myself.

We can learn a lesson from this Marine. He didn’t concentrate on his disabilities, but on what he could do. He didn’t let fear of failure or doing a poor job slow him down. He made up his mind to give it a shot—and he succeeded!

Let me leave you this quote by former US President Theodore Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong
man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The
credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and
sweat and blood; who strived valiantly; who errs and comes up short again
and again; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends
himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows at the end the triumph of
high achievement; and at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring
greatly, so his place shall never be with those cold timid souls who know
neither victory nor defeat.”