If you’ve ever felt anxiety that something exciting might be happening without you, you’re familiar with fear of missing out (FOMO). But what happens when you feel an underlying worry about making a mistake?
Fear of messing up (FOMU) can have the opposite effect from FOMO. Instead of spurring you to action, FOMU can lead to an overabundance of caution, according to Kellogg’s Ellen Taaffe.
“We’re not always conscious of why we might be holding back,” says Taaffe, a clinical associate professor of management and organizations and author of the recent book The Mirrored Door. “It’s all around what we think of ourselves or what other people think of us.”
Unease over potential miscues can strike at any point in your work life, though it may be most common among people who are earlier in their career or in a challenging new role.
“Self-judgment is especially common early in your career, while you’re still learning about both yourself and your profession,” Taaffe says.
And yet the effects of FOMU might be most detrimental as you ascend the career ladder and are increasingly expected to make decisions involving a greater degree of risk.
“Leadership is all about risk-taking—and you have to take more risks the higher you go,” Taaffe says. “As we grow in our careers, we have to be ready to assume that risk.”
Here, Taaffe offers tips on how to recognize FOMU, how to overcome it, and how to learn from your mistakes when they inevitably occur.
Identify what causes you to hesitate
FOMU manifests differently among people depending on their personalities, Taaffe explains. Whether you tend to be a perfectionist, a people pleaser, or what Taaffe calls a “patient performer,” your disposition can inform what, specifically, you might fear if you make a mistake.
While the behavioral motivations for FOMU—the fears—may vary according to your tendencies, they do share a common outcome—risk aversion. When you’re afraid to mess up, you typically don’t take chances.
For those with perfectionist tendencies, FOMU is often about fear of reputational damage. The worry is that you can hurt your own reputation or that of the company if you slip up.
“Those who lean toward perfectionism are people who are used to getting the gold stars and delivering in an excellent way,” Taaffe says. “But as they are charged with higher responsibilities, they can begin to feel like, ‘No, wait. I need to be more prepared. I’m not ready to decide.’”
Along with inhibiting decision-making, FOMU can also cause perfectionists to turn into micromanagers for whom “nothing is ever good enough,” warns Taaffe.
For people pleasers, the fear of messing up might be about the damage the mistake can do to your relationships.
“We have an outsized view of the reaction if we raise conflict, give negative feedback, or disagree,” Taaffe says of people pleasers. “So we may hold back when the time comes.”
People with the tendency to be patient performers, perhaps because of the values on which they were raised, aren’t necessarily inclined to assert themselves in risky situations—to ask for a raise or a promotion, for example.
For such patient performers, FOMU may reflect anxiety about engaging in behavior that conflicts with their own identity and self-image, according to Taaffe: “Doing so is almost like breaking the rules.”
Adjust your risk profile
So if you’re struggling with FOMU, how can you turn your risk dial to a more-suitable level where you are more inclined to take chances? Taaffe advises taking some clearly defined steps to shake up your old mindset.
To start, it’s important to remember that not taking action comes with its own negatives.
“It’s understanding the risk of leadership and the risk in our careers if we don’t step up,” she says. “There’s a little bit of, ‘What got us here won’t get us there.’”
The next steps you take again depend on your tendencies and past success strategies.
Perfectionists who are worried about their reputation may have to summon up the courage to do something that doesn’t come naturally: ask for help. This could come in the form of learning to delegate or asking their managers what to prioritize for a given project.
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For example, your boss can offer guidance on how much effort to put into the appearance of a slide deck. A supervisor can also clarify how long is too long to spend on an analysis before the bigger risk is delaying a new product launch. Efficiency, in certain cases, could be safer than exhaustiveness.
“There’s sometimes more risk in hesitancy and holding back than there is in moving forward without 100 percent perfect information,” Taaffe says.
On one level, perfectionists accustomed to the luxury of preparation may need to embrace the thinking of entrepreneurs, who routinely release a “minimum viable product” rather than a flawless one. Taaffe says, “What’s the minimum viable effort that gets us to a pretty good decision given the circumstances and urgency?”
In another sense, though, seasoned perfectionists may find that their extra prep work is no longer necessary, after all.
“You have to recognize, ‘What do I already know?’” Taaffe says. “Maybe you are ready enough to decide or to make a recommendation.”
Those who lean toward people-pleasing, similarly, may be in a better place from the outset than they realize due to the foundations they’ve laid.
“With a pleaser, their relationships are strong enough, generally, to risk sharing some disagreement without being disagreeable,” Taaffe says.
At the same time, people-pleasers may need to begin looking at their own tendencies in a fresh way. “Tap into all that care you have for other people to take the risk of speaking the truth,” Taaffe says.
For patient performers, recognizing the cost of their reticence can unlock the risk calculus.
“The risk is you can be seen as invisible,” Taaffe says. “Your lack of asking, lack of communication, can make others think that you’re not ambitious.”
Own your mistakes
That said, overcoming your fear of messing up doesn’t mean that mistakes won’t happen.
When something goes wrong, what’s important is owning the mistake and communicating it, rather than remaining silent and allowing the error to fester, according to Taaffe.
She recalls a snafu that took place years ago when she was head of the brand-management division of Quaker Oats. In the sales samples for a new product launch, the labeling on the side of the package said “oatmeat” rather than “oatmeal.”
Fortunately, the typo didn’t make it to store shelves, but the text had been through multiple layers of approval. At a team meeting, she acknowledged that it was on her watch and that mistakes happen. Ultimately, the mislabeling led to a permanent change in the approval process, Taaffe says.
“We were weary, and when that happens, we may miss that it says something because we just see it as ‘oatmeal,’” she recalls about the incident.
As a leader, Taaffe realized she could set an example in the oatmeal case by acknowledging the mistake and noting how taking responsibility helped her vanquish her own fear of messing up.
This kind of open vulnerability helps foster an environment where learning from failure is normalized, and the FOMU isn’t so strong. Another idea is to encourage weekly sharing of “epic fails,” Taaffe suggests. Hearing others regularly open up about small mistakes could help chip away at anxiety around taking a single misstep.
“How leaders respond matters a lot to creating a culture of appropriate risk-taking.”