Atychiphobia, commonly known as the fear of failure, haunts everyone at some point during their lives. The fear of failing can be as crippling as an anxiety problem and as limiting as a physical disability. Why? Because severe fear of failure keeps people from expanding beyond their comfort zones, setting goals and trying new things—all things that help a person grow. The key to accepting failure as a good thing is to change the way you view failure.

The voice inside your head that tells you “I can’t.” The nagging internal doubts that say “Don’t try, you might fail.” Those are thoughts and feelings holding you back from success. The good news: you can silence those thoughts and move past them.

When you look at yourself in the mirror, you see a different image than the image that everyone else sees. Looking in the mirror is a good metaphor for the practice of viewing yourself honestly and without a filter. In order to see yourself the way others see you, and to see the way you project yourself within the world, you must look inside of your self and examine what is happening inwardly. You can look in the mirror and tell yourself that you are OK, but you may not be, and everyone else will notice.

Some say that you are what you eat. This is, in a way, true. Your body used the nutrients from food as building blocks for proteins, fats, hormones and fluids in your body. Equally true is the statement: You are what you think.