One of the reasons your question is challenging is that "fear of failure" is a phrase our brains use to stop thinking about the horrible thing they don't want to think about. "Failure" is an abstract label, but the specific thing you fear isn't the literal failure to accomplish your goal. It's some concrete circumstance the situation will resemble, along with some defined meaning of the failure.
This is easier to see if you consider how many things you do every day that involve failure to accomplish a goal and yet do not provoke the same kind of emotion. Lots of things are "no big deal" and thus no big deal to fail at.
Things that are a "big deal" are a big deal because of some meaning we assign to them, either positively or negatively.
Mostly negatively.
More specifically: negatively, masquerading as positively. The "tell" for this is when your goals are suspiciously abstract or unclear. It's a strong sign that the real motivation for the goals is signaling, specifically signaling that you aren't something.
These days I call it GUPI Syndrome, for "Guilty Until Proven Innocent". Common patterns I see in my practice:
So quite often, the phrase "fear of failure" actually unpacks to "fear I will fail at my lifelong mission to prove I'm not {lazy, a loser, incompetent, stupid, not a man, irresponsible, etc...}".
And this can't be addressed by advice that's aimed at motivation or discipline or what-have-you, because the underlying emotional goal will never be satisfied. Ever.
You can't prove a negative, and that is fundamentally what this syndrome is about: proving you're not something that you're afraid other people may see you as.
(To be clear here, this is the generic "you" of anyone who is experiencing this, which I'm not saying is "you", the author of this question!)
Anyway, the solution to this problem is to stop trying to prove you're not whatever bad thing you fear you already are (or that people do/might believe you are). This may involve several sub-steps such as:
Is this a lot? Yes it is. But the payoff is that once you're no longer trying to prove a negative to your emotional brain, you have a lot more mental energy available to spend on goals that no longer seem like such a "big deal", and whose path to achievement feels much clearer.
(Also, it's hard to overstate how big a deal it is to not be feeling every day like someone is going to uncover your horrible secrets or everyone will see you fall on your face, or whatever the thing is that's going on.)
How do you define "failure"?
For example, if you try something and fail, in what sense is it worse than not having tried the thing at all (which would be your default action)? Okay, maybe you lost some time, but maybe you also learned something.
If you achieve half of what you wanted, is that a "success" or a "failure"? Again, compared to what? There is no correct answer -- it is what it is, 0 < 1/2 < 1, those are the facts.
If you wanted to bake 3 cakes, but you only baked 2, are those two small successes and one small failure, or is this all together one huge failure (with zero success)?
Are you actually worried about social consequences of failure?
Is the greatest problem that if you fail, someone will laugh at you? Maybe you shouldn't tell them. Maybe you shouldn't take their opinion so seriously, and instead find a friend who will encourage you for trying.
LW has a lot of advice on how to do more things, how to do them better, how to set goals, etc., and I often spend ages reading those, because I’ve been noticing that my life goals are unclear, that I’m not often strategic, and that my productivity clearly could use some improving.
And, until recently, reading all that stuff didn’t help me fix anything. Told me I should do this or that, but I didn’t, end of story. However, I’ve recently started to understand how much of my lack of ‘motivation’, ‘grit’, ‘goals’, ‘productivity’, etc. boils down to a huge fear of failure. But, apart from HPMOR chapter 10, which is what made me notice that this was the problem with me, I haven’t managed to find many useful resources here on how to fight my fear of failure. Given that "just go try and do stuff", while good advice, isn’t exactly easily actionable…
So, I wanted to ask: do we actually have advice on how to solve this problem?