‘I thought I feared failure. I was really afraid of disappointing people’

It made me wonder whether I was really afraid of failing at all, or afraid of what failing might say to the people whose good opinion I’d come to depend on.

The more I sat with it, the more I noticed how selective the fear was. I rarely asked myself, “Will this go wrong?” The question that actually formed, uninvited, was, “What if I let everyone down?”

When something goes well, I move on within the hour. When I make a mistake, I carry it for days, not because of the mistake itself, but because I’m convinced I’ve chipped away at somebody’s faith in me. Oddly still, praise doesn’t quite land as encouragement. It lands as a debt. The more someone believes in me, the more terrified I become of the day I don’t live up to it.

I’ve since learned this isn’t a personality trait, or at least not only that. It has a name, or several overlapping ones, and a shape that psychologists and sociologists recognise instantly once you describe it to them. It isn’t perfectionism, and it isn’t quite imposter syndrome either, though it often travels with both. It is something more specific: anxiety that is anchored not in the task, but in the relationship and in the fear of being the reason someone else’s trust turns out to have been misplaced.

The weight of being trusted

Rupali Rani, 28, an account manager who has spent years juggling high-priority deliverables, recognised the distinction the moment it was put to her. While handling multiple pressing projects at once, she realised she wasn’t afraid of the work itself. “For me, the fear has never been just about failure; it’s about not living up to the faith someone has placed in me,” she tells indianexpress.com.

That fear doesn’t announce itself as pressure every day. She genuinely likes her job, but when the workload builds, she finds herself overpreparing, rereading what she’s already sent, and struggling to properly switch off once the laptop is shut. Recognition, when it comes, complicates things rather than settles them. “Appreciation motivates me, but the ‘high performer’ tag also comes with invisible expectations,” she says.

Once people begin expecting excellence as a baseline, an average day starts to feel like a small betrayal. For a long time, she estimates, work claimed roughly eighty per cent of her emotional bandwidth against twenty for everything else, a ratio she is now trying, consciously and slowly, to correct. What has stayed with Rani is a line she now repeats to herself: trust, she says, “is built over time; not lost because of one imperfect day.”

For S Paul, 25, in her first job after campus placement, the fear arrived dressed as diligence. She was doing well, being praised, and still living with a low hum of dread that something might unravel it all. She began arming herself before she’d even reached her desk, absorbing tips and strategies from people who’d survived long careers, on top of an already demanding job, until the preparation itself became a second job.

Paul says she avoided taking leave because she worried it would look like a retreat to her manager, and found herself interrogating her own need for rest before allowing it. Praise, when it arrived, didn’t register as reassurance so much as a puzzle to be solved: after a strong training review, she assumed there had to be an ulterior motive, some reason her mentor was inflating the feedback. “I thanked him a million times,” she recalls, “and he had to tell me that I’m actually good. Guess what — I still don’t believe him.”

Eventually, the fear of letting people down became one of the reasons she resigned from a well-paying job she otherwise had every reason to keep. She is, in her own words, still looking for what will help.

Authoritarian households that prize obedience over warmth can leave children with a conditional sense of self-esteem (Source: Canva)

Where the fear is learned

Between these two accounts sits a pattern that mental health professionals say they encounter often enough to have a working theory about.

Lalit Taneja, an anxiety and confidence coach at Happy Mind, traces it back further than the office. Much of it, he says, “starts much before the workplace.” A child praised chiefly for grades, achievement, or being “the responsible one” can absorb the quiet lesson that worth is conditional on performance, a belief that resurfaces in adulthood as a habit of seeking validation from managers, colleagues, or clients.

He points to the American Psychological Association’s 2023 Work in America survey, which found that 77 per cent of employees reported work-related stress and 57 per cent said that stress had affected their emotional well-being, figures he reads as evidence of how tightly many professionals bind their sense of worth to their output.

Aarti Belani, a trauma-informed therapist and founder of Therapist.talks, locates the origin in something more specific than praise culture: the parenting style a person grew up with. Authoritarian households that prize obedience over warmth can leave children with a conditional sense of self-esteem, she says, so that “external approval becomes the only mirror we trust because we never learned to see ourselves clearly without it.”

What distinguishes this from ordinary fear of failure, she argues, is precisely its relational core. “It’s not the failure that stings, but how it changes their view of you,” she says. Fear of failure is about falling short of your own bar; imposter syndrome is the suspicion that your achievements were flukes waiting to be exposed. The fear of disappointing others is neither. It is about the look on someone else’s face.

Belani notes that all three can and often do coexist, and when they do, “they create paralysis, where the stakes feel impossibly high from every angle.”

Three fears, one knot

Dr Shachi Patel, a clinical psychologist, draws a similarly careful line between the three. Fear of failure, she says, is “primarily about making mistakes or not achieving a desired outcome”; imposter syndrome is the persistent conviction that success is undeserved and will eventually be found out. Fear of disappointing others, by contrast, “is more relationship-centred; it is driven by the worry of letting people down, losing their approval or being seen as unreliable.”

The three feed each other, she adds, each making the others harder to shake. As for where the line sits between healthy striving and something more corrosive, Patel shares, “Striving for excellence is healthy until it becomes the sole source of self-worth.” Guilt over resting, difficulty saying no, and the sense that you are only as valuable as your last achievement are, in her account, early signals worth taking seriously because once that threshold is crossed, “achievement is no longer motivating; it becomes emotionally draining.”

Why success doesn’t fix it

What makes the condition especially self-perpetuating, several of the professionals note, is that success rarely resolves it. If anything, it raises the bar. Taneja describes a coaching principle he calls the “80-20 Emotional Validation Framework,” which holds that roughly 80 per cent of a person’s self-worth should come from their own values and effort, with no more than 20 per cent resting on praise or recognition.

Belani’s version of the same advice is: hand in work that is genuinely good enough, she suggests, “that’s 65 per cent of your best, not the 110 per cent that burns you out.” Both are, in effect, arguing for the same recalibration — learning to ask, as Belani says, ‘What do I need? What matters to me?’ instead of ‘What will they think?’

A pattern

Dr Ashish Kumar, assistant professor (sociology), BPS Women’s University, Sonipat, Haryana, describes it less as an event than as a slow accretion. “It slowly becomes a pattern,” he says. “A ‘yes’ here, a guilt-ridden ‘no’ there.”

The avoidance of leave, the constant seeking of reassurance, the inability to switch off, these have become so normalised, in his observation, that they barely register as symptoms anymore. Dr Kumar does not frame this solely in individual terms, pointing instead to how relationships themselves can enter what he calls an “altruistic bind,” shaped by “a perpetual fear of active or passive resentment.”

He also notes, drawing on Neo-Freudian thought, that a distinct “fear of success” response has been observed particularly among women raised within unequal, patriarchal family structures, a dynamic he finds captured with unusual precision in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar. Even so, he resists treating any of this as fixed.

“A single therapeutic conversation can generate insights that help in achieving a breakthrough.”

What I no longer assume

I think back, now, to that habit of replaying every filed story. Of the particular relief of a piece going well, and the particular weight of one that didn’t. I don’t think the anxiety has disappeared, and I’m not sure it needs to. But I’ve stopped assuming it was ever about the work.

It was about the people standing just behind the work, and how much of my sense of self I’d quietly handed them to hold. Success, as it turns out, was never supposed to require standing guard over other people’s belief in you. It is about your faith in yourself.

DISCLAIMER: This article is based on information from the public domain and/or the experts we spoke to.