It’s weird but I feel kind of nervous sitting down to write about this topic… I have a sick, heavy feeling in my stomach right now and a thudding heart. And yet, I know that I can’t allow myself to run away from the prospect of failure yet again. Not this time.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have grown up believing that failure is something to be avoided at all costs.
From a young age, we had it drilled into us in school that we shouldn’t get things wrong, chasing those tantalising ticks and smiley faces, and squirming with shame at any crosses scratched across our work in angry red pen.
As an adult, I still feel that shame when things don’t go to plan. The hot cheeks and the squeezed stomach, the mental self-flagellation. (Yesterday I had to stop myself crying in a yoga class because I couldn’t hold the pose that everyone else seemed to do so easily!)
And yet, most of the time I don’t even get to that point, because like many people, I carefully orchestrate my life to avoid such a scenario at all cost – taking the safe road, avoiding the more dangerous pathways and researching every route before setting off so I know exactly where I’ll end up. *
The trouble with this approach is not only that you miss the opportunity to be positively surprised (who knows what wonders may lie along the more uncertain path?) but that you miss the opportunity to embrace failure and the opportunities it can bring to learn about ourselves and the world.
And by taking the more seemingly ‘comfortable’ route, we don’t even avoid discomfort as we end up living with a low-lying fear of it all going wrong – losing our ‘safe’ jobs or ‘reliable’ life-partners or our ‘steady’ income.
No, the only real way to deal with the agonising fear of failure is to tackle it head-on.
That’s what my mindfulness teacher friend Andy is doing, having set himself a challenge to fail every day for 50 days with suggestions from his community such as delivering a three minute improvised rap! It’s also what Jia Jiang talks about in his hilarious TED Talk when he describes how he launched into “100 days of rejection” in a bid to become a better entrepreneur and consciously went out of his way to try and be rejected (such as asking a policeman if he could have a go driving his car!).
It’s happily accepted in the start-up world that if you want to be truly innovative and to create a successful business, you have to get used to uncertainty and to putting yourself out there into potentially risky unknown territory. Otherwise you end up recycling other people’s business ideas and recreating the wheel (and nobody wants to buy the same old, tired wheel time and time again).
Successful entrepreneurs learn to manage this process skilfully by breaking down the risk into smaller, more manageable mini-risks, learning from the little failures and the unexpected cul-de-sacs along the way, and adapting their approach along the way.
In the Careershifters courses I lead, we recommend a similar approach to career changers, who are, just like entrepreneurs, in a period of high uncertainty. If you want to change career but don’t know what route to take, you are going to have to take some risks if you don’t want to end up doing the same work you’ve always done, but you can mitigate those risks by experimenting with some of your ideas in a small way first. In the Careershifters courses and my own coaching, we offer tools and a structure through which to do this in a way that feels manageable, and I help clients to develop a perspective that sees the ‘dead ends’ as potentially equally as valuable as the lightbulb moments.
As for me, I’ve still got a long way to go in inviting failure into my life. I know from reading the work of Carol Dweck, that (like many of you I’d imagine) I suffer from a ‘fixed mindset’ – something instilled from that school system that celebrates achievement rather than effort. This means we see ourselves in black-and-white – success or failure, good girl / bad girl, good writer / bad at maths, etc. Dweck found that when we reward children on their effort rather than results, we can help them develop a ‘growth mindset’, enabling them to see all setbacks as vital steps on the path to self-realisation and success.
So how can we start embracing failure and moving towards a growth mindset?
1) Celebrate when things go wrong.
Back when I was undertaking my original coaching training with CTI, our wonderful facilitators encouraged us from the start to cheer every time we ‘messed up’ by throwing our hands in the air and shouting “Ta Da!!” like a magician! Ben Zander, a composer with the Boston Philarmonic does a similar thing with his musicians, getting them to shout “How FASCINATING!” every time they get a note wrong. The impact of this is that we don’t take ourselves so damn seriously and allow ourselves to learn from our mistakes without being crushed by shame.
2) Consciously learn from mistakes.
It can be very tempting when things don’t go to plan to just brush it aside, have a stiff drink and pretend it didn’t happen. The problem with this is that it gets pushed down into our unconscious, feeding the fear of failure and preventing us from accessing the opportunities for growth that this experience could provide. Instead, then, take the time to reflect on what happened, what you could have done differently and list all the positive learnings you’ve gained from this that could serve you in the future. You could even keep a Learnings Jar, writing your “failures” and what you’ve gained from them on pieces of paper and rewarding yourself with a special treat once the jar is full, when you can also read back over them and see how far you’ve come. Gradually replace the word “failure” with the word “learning” in your mind.
3) Learn from other’s mistakes
The past “failures” of the hugely successful are well documented, from Einstein’s damning school report, to Steve Jobs being fired from the company he’d himself created. It can be inspiring to read about people who have not just survived failure but come out laughing and with great stories to tell about everything they learned along the way. Some cities run “Fuck Up Nights” where entrepreneurs and professionals share stories of things going wrong in order to challenge the taboo around speaking about mistakes, especially in the shiny world of business.
4) Embrace discomfort
This potentially contradicts what I was saying in an earlier post about effortlessness, but I do believe that growth comes at the edges of our comfort zone. This means we have to feel a bit ‘icky’ sometimes if we want to learn and develop, putting ourselves in a position where we might fail or rejected. Recently I promoted a workshop by sharing a video of myself and putting up posters all over town with my face on it. That felt hugely vulnerable, but I did it anyway because I really wanted to do the workshop (in the end I had to cancel it anyway due to a low level of interest, which was another great opportunity for me to embrace failure!). I’m glad I pushed through the embarrassment, because it will feel a whole lot less scary next time. Maybe. The trick, I’ve found, is to bring a kind attention to the physical sensations of the discomfort in my body, and then move on into action in full awareness of how I’m feeling and not pushing those feelings away, but not letting them hold me back either.
5) Take things in small steps.
It’s better to take a few tentative baby-steps down the road less travelled than to keep walking round in circles, held back by fear. Courage is like a muscle – the more we use it the more courageous we become, so we can start small and work upwards, just like you would exercising a muscle at the gym. Try something new, see how that feels, and embrace the discomfort in stepping into uncertainty. Then, the likelihood is that if things go wrong, they probably won’t go TOO wrong, and you can simply pick yourself up, re-calibrate and continue along your journey.
Thanks for reading and please do feel free to exorcise the demons and share any stories in the comments of failures you’ve had in life and your career and what you’ve learned/gained from them – I’d love to hear from you!
*Some of you, knowing I’ve been living in Asia for the last couple of months may be surprised by this self-assessment, but it’s worth pointing out that I’ve been staying on the same Thai Island I’ve been to twice before because I knew it had reliable internet and haven’t yet made it to India where my partner works as planned because I was worried about poor connection getting in the way of my work. Anyway, this stuff is all relative!!