Hello and welcome back to my lunch table. This is the podcast where courageous leadership meets the practical. I'm Simon Hague, your host, and today we're going to tackle something that holds so many brilliant people back, and that's the fear of failure. So let's start by a stat that really made me stop. According to the state of Small Business Britain 2024, a whopping 60% of non entrepreneurs say fear of failure is the main thing. Stopping them from launching a business. And it doesn't just affect would be founders. It seeps into the culture of small and medium sized businesses, quietly shaping decisions, stalling innovation, and often going unspoken. So, so over the next 10 minutes, I want to help you bridge that gap to move through fear not around it. And I'll share a couple of practical models you can use right away, including the A, BCDE model from rational emotive behavior therapy, REBT to help you or your clients move forward. So let's dive in. Let's be honest. Fear of failure isn't irrational. It's hardwired back in the day. Taking a risk could mean real danger. Fast forward, and our brain still treats uncertainty like a saber tooth tiger waiting for his next meal. But now the danger is launching a new product, pitching a bold idea, or switching up your business model. This fear shows up as overthinking, perfectionism, procrastination, or playing it small. Does that sound familiar? If so, you're not alone. More than half of the UK's entrepreneurial energy is stuck in first gear because of it. But here's the good news. We've got a couple of models to share with you that can help you get through this. Inside many small businesses, we find that resources are tight and the stakes feel high. Business is running very fast at the moment with the internet and social media promising to put our new offering in front of everybody in a very, very fast way. But sometimes the fear doesn't always roar. It sometimes whispers, let's stick to what we know. What if this flops. Let's wait until we're a hundred percent sure. This leads to what I call culture lockdown. Ideas die in drafts. People hold back and teams focus on not losing rather than winning. When leaders operate from fear, it trickles down, but there's a bridge, and this is what we're gonna be talking about today. A couple of models which can help you forward. So the first model is something called the A-B-C-D-E model. And let's get practical. One of my favorite frameworks is this, it is from a train of thinking called rational emotive behavior therapy, looking at the psychology of how our brains work. Here's how it works, A, b, c, d, ER, an abbreviation or, or, uh, first letter in, um, a phrase. Okay, so a stands for activating event. What happened? Maybe you pitched an idea and it got shot down. B is belief. What's your belief about that event? I failed, so I'm not cut out for this. C is consequence. How do you feel and act as a result? Anxious, withdrawn. Maybe you stop sharing ideas. And D is dispute and this is where the real magic starts. A, B, C is all about the event. You challenge what the belief is that you've started to think about? Is that really true? Is it helpful? What else could be true? Do I really always get stuck on that motorway or freeway? No, I don't do I, I often can just pass straight through. Do I always fail when I stand up in front of an audience and talk to'em? No, actually, 95% of the time it goes absolutely fine. It's just that one per that one time, which was just, ah, just thinking about it now just brings me out in sweats. E stands for effective new behavior. Now you choose a more constructive approach. Maybe you seek feedback, try again or refrain the experience as a lesson. So let's make this real. Picture this. You run a campaign and it doesn't land. Instead of spiraling. I'm terrible at marketing. You could adopt the A-B-C-D-E model. A activating event is campaign flops. B is the belief, geez, I always mess up. C. The consequence you feel really deflated and you tend to avoid new ideas. D is where we dispute it and the magic happens. Challenge it. Is it true? I always mess up. What did I learn? What could I do differently? And e is the effective new behavior. You test a new approach, maybe with a smaller audience, but you keep moving forward. So this framework helps you spot and disrupt your, um, unhelpful thinking, making failure less scary and more useful. So another approach I use with some clients is something called normalizing micro failures. Instead of seeing failures as catastrophic, treat it as feedback, a chance to learn and adapt, break big goals into smaller experiments. This is akin to agile run micro tests. If something doesn't work, it's not a disaster, it's data. This builds psychological safety where your team can say, huh, that didn't work. Let's try again. Without fear. Pair this with a growth mindset. See failure as a lesson, not a verdict. Give yourself permission to fail and learn from that failure. Focus on what you can control and break projects into manageable chunks, and use positive mantras to reinforce your confidence and keep your perspectives optimistic. So in the example I gave above about the campaign, we can think about breaking the campaign into small elements. There's gonna be elements that you've done absolutely fantastically well at. It could be that analyzing the data has been a forte for you. It could be that standing in front of people have been superb, but actually the data that you formatted wasn't in the right format. So it didn't work that way. Or it could have been that you just had. You just ran straight from a business meeting straight into the presentation, and your brain just wasn't in the right space. So understanding where potentially that failure is allows us to grow into the space of, Hey, I'm really good with data now. What I need to do is I need to take that data and put that into a format. The audience will understand. Hey, I'm fantastic at standing up in front of people. But I need to really stop and make sure I understand what I'm talking about. Okay? Right. I'm running at 300 miles an hour. This presentation that I'm doing is really important to me and my business, and actually my future career depends on this. What if I just gave myself 10 minutes? Hey, I need to go to Lou anyway, so let's just give myself some time just to get my mindset into the right space and imagine and visualize what that outcome of that meeting's gonna be. All those three things are in essence the E, whereby we are testing a new approach and that takes us to a different space. So thinking about what I do when I'm working with clients, I don't just show up with all the answers, but what I would do do is bring better questions. We help people move from, what if I get this wrong to what can I learn about this? So I work with clients all the time with this particular A, B, C, D, E framework and help people to turn small experiments into new income streams. So that's the power of reframing, that's the power of reframing failure. It's not about being fearless, it's about moving forward, learning as you go. So whether you're leading a business advising one, or standing on the edge of starting, here's what I want you to take from today. Fear of failure is universal, but it doesn't have to be the dead end. Use models like a CDEs challenge, unhelpful beliefs, and reframe your thinking. Normalize micro failures and see them as stepping stones, not stumbling blocks, and work with people that can help shift your mindset from fear to growth. People like coaches, business coaches, executive coaches. So if you're ready to work on your fear of failure into. A Growth Edge, maybe download our free failure reframing worksheet at my lunch table.com/podcast/six. It's packed with prompts and reflections. You can use solo with your coach or with a team, and if this episode sparks something for you, then please do share it with another leader who's quietly holding back. So let's normalize learning through failure and help build a. Braver business community. Thanks for listening to my lunch table today. Until next time, keep learning forward.