amelia.nashe@gmail.com
amelia.nashe@gmail.com
Greetings, my fellow See-Saw-ers! So it’s already March – how did that happen?! Valentine’s and Pancake Days have come and gone and in my local park, the tulips are somehow still naïve enough to think it’s Spring, even as the snowflakes cover them and the hail batters them for what must be the third wintry March in a row. You can’t help but look at the delicately blooming, brightly coloured poor wee sods and wonder how they never learn.
Appropriately enough for the subject of this post, I failed to mark Pancake Day because I was too busy talking about pancakes at a hundred miles an hour to eat any. And no, that was because I was on the late shift at work, subtitling some incredibly fast and random banter between a bunch of news presenters, not because I could talk the hind legs off a mule. Which, in all fairness, I could.
But of course over the past month, that has by no means been my only failure. Only this month, that’s just meant I’ve had more material on which to try out my research. I’ve read countless blogs, positivity quotes, listened to hours and hours of podcast episodes and gone to sleep watching so many YouTube videos around the subject of dealing with failures I’m practically the Dalai Larma. Okay, so that’s a total exaggeration, but what I will say is putting the below techniques into practice has already started to help me redefine failure, and change my habitual thinking about myself when I fail. So without further ado, I’ll share with you my five-step practical plan to make failure work for you:
So you’ve just found out that you’ve failed at something. Whether it’s a mistake you’ve made, a job or opportunity you’ve not been given, or a relationship that has broken down. Let’s be honest: it feels shit. Even if it’s something you didn’t consciously expect to succeed with, or something really small, it can still wipe the smile off your face, give you that little drop of dread in your stomach, a gut punch feeling like a toddler has smashed their dinky fist right into your abdomen.
As for the bigger stuff, well, that hurts. We’ve all been there. And it’s only natural to immediately want that hurt to go away, to push it down, distract yourself, ignore it. But, contrary to what you might expect in a blog post about making your relationship with failure more positive, I am actually advising you to lean into that pain. Don’t get me wrong, this is not permission to wallow. I’m not suggesting you take to your bed with a box of tissues and a stress ball for the rest of your life. Just allow yourself to feel the emotions that come up in the immediate aftermath of failure. They are a sign that you care, after all. And who wants a life they don’t care about?
When I first came across this advice in my research, I thought it was a bit self-indulgent, but since then I have scarcely read a well-informed article/blog post or listened to/watched a podcast or video that doesn’t at least mention the idea of sitting in your pain before you do anything else to deal with failure. You may think it’s not productive, but I’m telling you, all the experts agree there’s simply no getting round it. Embrace the fear, dread, anger, resentment, anxiety, sadness, jealousy and whatever else comes up for you for just long enough to understand and acknowledge what you feel.
If you find it’s a complex muddle of feelings you can’t even identify, maybe try writing them down, or even just writing about the facts of what happened, as this can often help you to untangle the knots of complex emotion we sometimes tie ourselves into. If it’s an overwhelmingly powerful feeling and you just need to get it out, try speaking to a loved one who will listen. Trust me, it will help you get over the failure quicker. This is a strategy that I have long adopted automatically, so I can speak to its effectiveness.
An ex-boyfriend once commented that I always get extra emotional in the moment of the failure and seem to need to vent/worry about it, but then as soon as I’m done venting I can go back to being productive. He marvelled at it and seemed to be suspicious of the truth of the initial emotion, but I responded that it was the venting and the release of (very real) emotion that then allowed me to be productive. It’s a process of catharsis, of getting the emotion out as quickly as possible so that none of your energy is then wasted on repressing it later. Even on a simpler level, as Psychology Today puts it,
So in summary, before you do anything else you’ve got to bring on the pain.
You’ve felt the emotion, now it’s time to bring in the big guns: the intellect. Look at your failure as if it’s a university assignment. If you studied any kind of Arts degree like I did, that should mean analysing the shit out of it in as detached a manner as you can manage. And yes, I know this may seem different because, as we have just established, there may be strong emotions involved. But when I had to write an essay on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, there were some pretty strong emotions involved too, and I managed not to write an essay that consisted of emotional bias such as “Milton is so far up his own arse in this I’m surprised the poem ever made it to the light of day”.
If I achieved that, you can have a go at viewing your failure dispassionately. Look at the facts – what happened, what were the circumstances? Work out how much it is really your failure in the sense of mistakes or lack of preparation, and how much it is down to the other people involved, or rather the better success of other individuals. Try your best to be honest and just look at the facts with this, as that is the only way to learn and improve. As the verywellmind blog puts it neatly,
It takes courage to own up to your part in a failure, but doing so will enable you to move forwards. Equally, if you are taking all the blame onto yourself for not doing a good enough application to a competition you know gets literally thousands of applications, well, with those numbers there is bound to be a certain amount of luck involved, and you can’t possibly know whose applications happened to stand out because what they have written strikes a chord with the reader.
Wherever the responsibility for the failure lies, it is important to work out why you failed on this occasion so that you can…
I know, the bee thing is cheesy, but their whole thing is busy productivity, so it kind of works…no? No. Ah, well. I will attempt to work on my animal-related metaphors by the end of this post and come up with something better. Which is a very neat segue into the reason why you need to make a plan. To recap, you’ve got stung by the failure; sworn like a trooper in the moments afterwards and posted pics of your pain all over Insta to elicit validating cries of ‘Ooh, that looks sore!’; you realised it happened because you chose to sit right next to the bee’s nest with honey on toast and a can of juice – translation for non-Scots readers, a fizzy, sugary drink. What next? Other than a good squeeze of savlon and a firm telling off for crowbarring in more bee metaphors?
Obviously this has not been a pleasant experience, so you don’t want it to happen again. What do you do? Simples. Make a plan to try to prevent it happening again. It may seem “duh”-inducingly obvious, but in reality quite an alarming proportion of us conclude that the best thing to do is to just not try again. To basically give up and go home, and never stick our heads above the parapet ever again, lest they be blown off in a swarm of beestings.
Michael Litt, a very charismatic entrepreneur, demonstrated this tendency of human nature in a TED talk where he showed his audience an optical illusion and asked them to shout out to indicate which line in the illusion was longer.
The majority of the audience confidently shouted out that they were the same length, but after he showed them they were in fact wrong – and had therefore failed to answer the question correctly – and asked them a similar question later in the talk, he was met with a deathly silence. The point he was making was that most people in that room had ‘learned’ not to even risk failure by speaking up. They had decided their previous experience of failure was so negative that it wasn’t worth trying again. But, as he went on to argue, this is the wrong attitude to take if you want to succeed.
Don’t be discouraged by failure. Easy to say, hard to do, right? But this is a huge part of how to do it. So, having worked out why you failed in the previous step, make a plan that will hopefully stop you failing in the same way next time you try. And when I say make a plan, I mean actually write it down. If you don’t know where to start, start small. Take the next thing you are hoping to succeed at and break it down into individual tasks that take into account where you failed last time. This will help motivate you to move forward, and the quicker you do that, the quicker you’ll fail and therefore the quicker you’ll succeed. So yeah, get planning like the busy bee you are!
Our brains are odd things. Even after we think we’ve got strategies in place, things to do to shift our negative attitudes, they come right back at us with worries about the future and fears about past failures repeating themselves. As the former Chief Business Officer for Google X, Mo Gawdat, says in his interview on the How To Fail podcast,
He goes on to explain that the incessant thinking is the negative ruminations that come from an evolutionary impulse that, if we let it, will lead us to constantly worry about the dangers of what might happen in any given situation. In our modern-day lives, these ‘dangers’ may include looking stupid in front of other people – as in the TEDX talk example – rather than getting eaten by tigers, but the brain works with what it’s got. Useful thinking is analytical, problem solving, the part of your brain you will have used to analyse what went wrong in this particular instance of failure. Joyful thinking is observational, simply looking outside of yourself in the present moment and appreciating what you have and the world around you.
I, for one, found the simplicity of this ‘triad of thought’ theory appealing. Firstly because it gave me an excuse to use the words ‘triad of thought’. But mostly because I hear a lot about how ruminative, obsessive or incessant thinking – call it what you want, it’s all the same thing – is a bad habit that is at the root of my and lots of others’ anxieties, and how we need to learn to ignore it. ‘I am no longer going to believe everything I think’ is my latest positive affirmation. This is all well and good, but after you’ve told your brain you don’t believe you’re a total failure because you lost your debit card in your own home (true story), what then? It’s not about to shut up, just because you called it out for lying. So do you ignore it? It’s quite tiring trying to ignore your brain. And boring. I mean,
if you’re constantly doing things to try to distract yourself from what you’re thinking and never actually allowing yourself to think deeply, you’ll find yourself living a very shallow life…
Instead, Mo Gawdat offers the solution of switching to useful or joyful thinking. So if you find yourself spiralling back into obsessively beating yourself up for your past failures or worrying about the likelihood of failure of your next attempt, do yourself a favour and say this to yourself – out loud, if it helps: “Is that really true? And even if it is, how is it helpful? Give me a helpful thought, something I can act on.” This is where you can steer yourself back to your plan, taking positive action that you wouldn’t know to take if it weren’t for your previous failure.
If the ruminative thoughts are too persistent to focus on taking positive action, try joyful thinking. Literally stop and look at the world around you. Take stock of your place in it, in the ‘big picture’. Are you healthy? Do you have a roof over your head? Do you have supportive friends? Do you have a partner? It’s not just about feeling thankful for these things, but it’s also about viewing them as successes partly made by you. Yes, there is a certain amount of luck involved, where you were born, etc. But also, you wouldn’t have friends if you weren’t succeeding in maintaining those friendships. You wouldn’t be healthy if you weren’t succeeding in looking after yourself. See what I’m getting at? Even when your brain is telling you your entire existence is an epic fail, if you look around you, you will realise that is clearly not the case. So, useful thinking or joyful thinking. Take your pick.
In our celebrity-centric society, we are constantly bombarded with stories of famous people’s success – especially at this time of year, when we’ve just had the awards season in film and TV. That’s absolutely not what I’m saying you should look at here. In fact, my advice would be to ignore all the glam and the glitter, and look for the stories of the failures behind the success. Notice I used the plural ‘failures’ with the singular ‘success’. That’s because for any one perceived success, there will be many, many failures. Everybody’s favourite quote to use is legendary American basketball player, Michael Jordan’s:
Just epic, isn’t it? The sheer number of failures this guy had to go through to succeed. But succeed he did, in spectacular fashion. And another oft-quoted example is that of Thomas Edison. Inventor guy, you might have heard of him, made a pretty decent contribution to the lightbulb that’s currently making sure I can see to type this. Anyway, he spent decades of his life working on experiments that failed, and yet he said:
Now maybe he was saying that for effect, and sure, it perhaps sounds a little arrogant, but he did get there in the end, and achieved an incredible and lasting legacy because of it. I think we can all take our cue from this attitude. You don’t completely fail until the day that you give up. Until that time, you are just honing your approach, narrowing down the possible options to find the right way to succeed. When it comes to the different routes of potential success, it’s a bit like that obligatory line from a policeman to a worried suspect in any crime drama; you’re just eliminating them from your enquiries. So no matter how big the failure, you dust yourself off and get back out there. If you feel like you’re losing your way and are surrounded by demoralising success stories, check out the links below for the real and inspiring stories of failure. I promise you, you will find that the story of success and the story of failure are one and the same.
I hope all of the above ideas and tips are useful for you. I have tried to put some practical, simple things in this post that will help you shift the way you see failure. If you try them out, please do let me know how you get on. You can comment below, or reach out on social media via the links below.
I would love to see us get to a world where kids are not brought up fearing failure, in exams and the like, but running towards it, eager to learn. Or a world where we can live in the moment a bit more, not in fear of the future prospects of our endeavours or in thrall to our previous failures. This is really a subject for another post, but the thought I would like to leave you with is this:
whether we fail or succeed in the end, it is the journey that we really live for. So zen, I know. But it’s something I was reminded of the other day when I was telling someone I had just met about how I have been busy applying for funding, and now am busy working out back-up plans because I’m worried that I may not get it. And instead of sympathising and wishing me luck, as most people would have done, she replied, “Sounds fun, living in the midst of all that. A real thrill, chasing your dream”. It stopped me in my tracks, to be honest. I had to admit I hadn’t thought of it like that. But she was right. As humans, we strive for success because we want to, because the act of working towards purpose, towards something meaningful, is rewarding, fulfilling. Fun. So there you are. Once again, failure is fun. Put that in your bee sting and suck it.
Thank you so much for reading See-Saw, and please do check out the links below. There is some really thought-provoking, inspirational, potentially life-changing stuff there. Take care, and I’ll be back in April with a topic that I haven’t quite decided on yet; let’s just say I think it will be play-ful, one way or another! Xx
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