2020-3-NL02-KA205-003289 – Ovecoming fear of failure

t’s almost impossible to go through life without experiencing some kind of failure. People who do so probably live so cautiously that they go nowhere. Put simply, they’re not really living at all. But, the wonderful thing about failure is that it’s entirely up to us to decide how to look at it.

In a morally supported culture, called a guilt culture, “you know you are good or bad by what your conscience feels. In a shame culture, you know you are good or bad by what your community says about you, by whether it honours or excludes you. In the shame culture, social exclusion makes people feel they are bad”.(Crouch 2016, The shame culture – https://bit.ly/3cJZuB4)
The omnipresence of social media has created a new sort of shame culture, since it’s a world of constant display and observation, where success equals inclusion and acceptance. Our internal research found interesting facts in the study “The effect of You Can Do It! Education in six schools on student perceptions of wellbeing, teaching, learning and relationships”, where researchers have developed and implemented a positive psychology program through a “Train the trainer” methods. The results indicated an overall positive effect on students’ attitudes and self-perceptions of different aspects of their wellbeing, fostering motivation and confidence – https://bit.ly/36k6fs9 .

With our project, we aim to prevent/mitigate the feeling of fear regarding the chances of failing any endeavors, through the use of positive psychology. We will foster the learning and implementation of positive psychology to change the view on mistakes in one’s life, helping to cope with the effects of failure.

Positive psychology is a scientific study on what makes people thrive and focuses on behaviours that can lead to a more optimized frame of mind to lead to more practical actions, much like cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Compared to CBT, positive psychology focuses more on what makes already-functional; it focuses on strengths instead of weaknesses (Martin Sellingman, Father of modern positive psychology – https://bit.ly/PositivePsychologyDef ). Positivity improves life, working place, family and society as a whole.

Therefore, our project has a focus on how to handle the problem of preventing fear of failure with a universal approach which can be useful for young adults and youth workers, that will be our target group.