What do you do if your fear of failure is hindering your innovative career?

It is one of the best ways of overcoming fear. As this will give one to understand what are the hurdles between your goals success

Fear of failure or is it reality? Quoting Asim Qureshi here : A few years ago, I encouraged a close friend to take more risks in his career, and his response was, "I'm supporting my parents, a sibling, my wife and kids. I mess up, we're out on the street." I didn't encourage him again. Now, over the years, many have told me that they really respect me as I gave up a fantastic career to pursue my dream of becoming an entrepreneur. The reality is that it was nothing more than privilege at play. Unlike many, including my friend, I had the luxury of being able to fail. I also had a wife that encouraged me to go for it. Risks aren't as risky for those that can afford to take them - heroism is often nothing more than the omission of details.

Acknowledging is the start of any internal work. Understanding the why(s) is also important to understand the roots of that fear and any potential ramifications.

Failure is actually a concept of the mind, failure doesn't exists by itself as much as success doesn't exist. Both are arbitrary, binary perceptions imposed upon ourselves by ... ourselves. Exbit A we can feel we are failing at any stage of of our career regardless of our achievements at the time. Learning and growth are perfectly valid replacements for failure and success.

When I try a new task, I'm not very good at it. I'm new. That's the point. I'll get better over time. That's how all of life works. Find something simple to fail at. Practice being okay. Call it an experiment. That makes it easier. "I'm trying something with the expectation that it won't work on the first attempt."

Goals are particularly important not to assess whether we failed or succeeded but instead to assess whether we should continue or drop something.

Vulnerability is the most important soft skills to grow if we want to keep our fears in check. Our fears are the product of our egos and just like the latter they want to isolate us, this is how they derive their power, if we expose them they vanish like a vampire under a UV light.

Fear needs to be be felt, exposing it intellectually, conceptually is not enough we need to feel it and practice equanimity on the bodily sensations (spoiler alert they are pretty uncomfortable) that the fear is generating.