One of the primary things that stops people from expanding their comfort zone and becoming more successful is their fear of failure and their fear of rejection.

Successful people also know that there’s no such thing as failure, only learning. The only way to fail is if you tell yourself that you’ve failed. No one besides you can say whether you’re a failure or not.

Successful people make their own definitions about success and failure. What if your new definition of success was giving it your all and learning something from the situation. And what if you decided the only way you could declare yourself a failure was if you gave up and didn’t try something else or change your approach. Whatever your rules are, make it easy to succeed.

A great example of this principle is a client I had who had six years of back taxes owing when she first came to me for coaching. Within our first two weeks of working together, she had the first year done.

But even with one year done, she felt like a failure because she had five more years staring her in the face. Feeling this way didn’t empower her, so I helped her reframe things so that she could see how much further ahead she was now than before she came to see me.

Buoyed with her new definition of success, she got the remaining five years done in two months time and avoided a penalty because she completed that current year’s taxes before the end of June.

In addition to overcoming their fear of failure, successful people overcome their fear of rejection. A story about Colonel Saunders, of KFC fame illustrates this point well.

The colonel approached 1009 people before he got someone to agree to be a franchisee. That’s right,1009. Can you imagine the internal conversation Colonel Saunders had to have with himself in order to keep going after the first 100 rejections? After the second hundred? And after a thousand?

What if you were like Colonel Saunders and other successful people, what if you decided that the only way you’d allow yourself to feel rejected is if you allowed yourself to feel that way?

There is nothing and no one outside of yourself who can generate that painful emotion except you. This point is really, really important because we allow it to stop us from becoming successful and achieving our dreams. The good news is that while this fear is universal, it can be overcome.

The trick to doing that is getting enough leverage, or ammunition to follow through. Write down the benefits you will receive if you don’t have to worry about the fear of rejection. Then the price long term if you don’t overcome this fear in your life. This is using the carrot and the stick.

Create a new set of rules for what must happen for you to feel rejected and don’t make it easy to feel that way. Realize that people aren’t rejecting you, just your idea; you’re more than what you just said or what you just did. And if they’ve just met you, how can they be rejecting you, they don’t know you well enough to reject you.

What if you could redefine and rewrite your personal definition of success and failure, how would your life be different, what would it look like? And what if you could overcome your fear of rejection, how would your life be different, what would it look like?

Overcoming your fear of failure and rejection is a muscle, the more you practice doing so, the stronger it becomes. When do you plan to go to, “the gym?”