Ask AltoTRY · 12 MIN
Failure Before Failure
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It is a year from now and this failed. Write the reason before you start.
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Tool 78 · Develop yourself
What am I afraid of, and what is it quietly costing me?
A guided 14 to 18 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Some fear is accurate. Most of it is unexamined.
What do you not do because of it?
Some fear is accurate. Say which part.
Price the avoidance, not the event.
What you'll look at
- 01The fear
- 02The avoidance
- 03The cost
- 04The recovery
A note from Mark
Most people can tell you they're afraid of failing. Very few can tell you what failing would actually look like on a Tuesday.
The general fear is the problem. It can't be tested, so it just sits there making decisions for you.
I look at what somebody doesn't do. That's the real record.
And then I ask what they'd do the day after the thing they dread. Usually the answer is ordinary, and the fear loses some of its authority.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
The fear
02
The cost
03
The recovery
04
The test
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you are afraid of
- 02What it is costing you
- 03How likely it actually is
- 04What you would do if it happened
- 05Which part is worth heeding
- 06The rival reading
- 07What deserves protecting
- 08Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
The fear, named.
02 · Test it
Do the smallest version of the thing you avoid.
See more ↓
What I would do
- 01
Write the fear in one specific sentence.
- 02
List what you do not do because of it.
- 03
Price that list honestly.
- 04
Work out the recovery, not just the event.
- 05
Test the smallest version of the thing you avoid.
Test it
- 01
What do you avoid because of it?
- 02
How likely is it, honestly?
- 03
What would you do the next day?
The alternative
The usual reading is that fear should be pushed through. Sometimes the fear is reading the situation correctly and the sensible move is to heed it. The reverse also happens. Somebody prices the disaster carefully and never once considers what they would do the next morning, and the recovery turns out to be ordinary.
Think about this
- What you are afraid of, specifically.
- What you avoid because of it.
- What that avoidance costs.
- How likely the thing actually is.
- What you would do the day after it happened.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Want to go further?
Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Further thinking
The Happiness Trap
Russ Harris
Steven Hayes on psychological flexibility
Dan Harris with Steven C. Hayes
Stress, Appraisal and Coping
Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman
See the thinking ↓
Book
The Happiness Trap
Russ Harris
The plainest introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy, where values are treated as directions you keep moving in rather than rules you either obey or break. It also makes the case that rigid rule-following, even about admirable things, is one of the more reliable ways to make yourself miserable.
Podcast
Steven Hayes on psychological flexibility
Dan Harris with Steven C. Hayes
Hayes founded the approach behind the previous entry, and the conversation is more useful than the books because he is being pushed on it. The part worth your time is where he separates a value you are moving towards from a rule you are obeying, and explains why holding the second one too tightly damages the first.
Book
Stress, Appraisal and Coping
Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman
The origin of the distinction between tackling a problem and managing the response to it. The argument is that the right choice depends on whether the situation can actually be changed, which is exactly the judgement most people skip.
Article
Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioural change
Albert Bandura
The paper that broke confidence into pieces. Bandura's argument is that belief in your capability is built for a specific domain, mostly out of things you have already done and that it transfers far less than people assume. That is why a person can chair a board and dread a party without either being a contradiction. It also names the strongest source of confidence, which is not encouragement but mastery experience.
Book
Quit
Annie Duke
The counterweight to almost everything else written about avoidance. Duke argues that we are far better at persisting than at stopping, and that most of the cost of a bad commitment is paid after the point where we already knew. If the thing you keep postponing is something you have quietly decided against, this is the book that gives you permission to say so and a way to test whether you are right.