Fear of failure leads directly to underachievement. Why? It paralyzes initiative and leads us to duck out on challenges, pull back effort and quit. The result is that we wind up doing less with our abilities than we know we could. And self-attack and energy-sapping mood swings follow.

Here's what to do to end fear of failure.

First realize that to duck out on a challenge, quit, or pull back effort, is to directly choose defeat. And that's because you guarantee failure when you hold back and surrender without a fight. If failure is what you want to avoid, perversely, by not trying, you not only give in to failure, you actually create it.

If it looks like you're going to avoid some kind of humiliating failure by withdrawing effort, look again. Sure, you can always say, "I could've if I'd wanted to," but by doing so, you seal your fate. Ducking out is a no-contest way of submitting to failure. In effect, by attempting to avoid failure, you embrace failure without resistance.

To move forward, instead of disengaging, engage. Get in the game. Make your statement, be a presence and a participant in your own life. Do what you can do and decide to learn from the outcome. In other words, instead taking a perfect-or-nothing stance, be a beginner, a learner. Make your effort a work in progress. Assess the results of your efforts, and then resume with the knowledge gained.

The rewards of engagement alone are colossally more pleasurable, no matter the outcome, than the relief you imagined you would have by yielding to fear in order to avoid failure. Avoiding failure provides no satisfaction. And you feel like a coward. Engaging, on the other hand, immediately yields satisfaction, even when you are not successful the first time out. In fact, you should presume you won't be successful the first time out. Would what you are doing really be worthwhile or significant if it were so easy? Only by engaging, do you learn.

Besides, where's the satisfaction of sitting on the sidelines of life?

When you understand that what you do by the mere act of engaging is of inestimably greater importance than whether you fail or not, you immediately live on a different, more vivid, plane.

A failure makes judgment of who you are as a person in only one way:  it stands as proof that you are a person who wants to go beyond the status quo and that you are in the process of stretching and learning.

The outcome of any effort reflects only what you have learned so far.