To fail and yet not "be" a failure

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Priyanka Bhatia-Mahendru, One of Thousands of Relationship Coaches on Noomii.

As a coach, I see a lot of people grieving the loss of a failed relationship, of not having gotten the promotion they had been working for, of not scoring that winning goal, of not being able to get the project they were vying for.

All of us face failure on a daily basis in some form. We fail consistently.. a lot.
Failing is an inherent part of our human experience beginning at birth. A baby falls a hundred times a day before being able to balance and walk, uses garbled speech for months before being able to say actual words, spills food everywhere before learning to eat on his/her own. Thankfully (!) failure is okay for infants and really young children. And for some reason it goes from being okay and having permission to fail to suddenly one-day failure being unacceptable, even for our children.
A curious occurrence!

And then we grow into adults and our relationship with failure is one of not wanting it around, of pushing it away. Though, when we look at our natural way of learning in our most basic human tasks, failure seems to play a huge part of this learning process.

Our Individual, familial as well as societal reaction to failure is like us being a harsh sports coach, taking ourselves out of the football game, sitting ourselves on the bench and self-berating for the rest of the game. And no, it doesn’t stop there; we continue with the negative self-depreciating talk in our heads way after the game is over.
Do this consistently and we end up with self-doubt, getting good at emotional self-flogging! and feeling more and more incompetent.

According to the Oxford dictionary, Failure is the “lack of success”. Interestingly in the dictionary failure is described as a noun. Failure should be a verb, which is something “we do”, however when we let failure become a noun, it becomes something that “we are”.

“ I failed” versus “I am a failure”.

No one has ever taught us the difference between the two. Look back at a time when you failed at something and did not meet your goals. Did you overlap failing versus being a failure?

And that’s what makes me write this article. I want to lift the carpet over this dirty lil’ secret and say out loud- Yup! I have failed at many things in my life, as a matter of fact I fail quite often at something or the other.. and I’m okay with that!
I am not a failure, I have failed!

In a study published in Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers told some sixth graders "that learning is difficult and failure is common, but practice will help, just like learning how to ride a bicycle” and some were told nothing. The ones who were told to expect failure did much better on memory tests and reading comprehension tasks than the other kids.

According to this research, by “normalizing” failure, the researchers helped the kids’ performance and self-confidence.

Does this seem counter-intuitive to everything you have ever heard or tell yourself? We flog ourselves into action, motivation and hard work using failure as something we need to run away from.

Do you say to yourself, “But if I tell myself it is okay to fail, I will not be bothered to work hard or be motivated”?
If yes, seriously, stop! Motivation to study or work hard needs to come from the joy of learning, joy of doing something you love, joy of discovery and joy of learning rather than dear of failure. Too long schools, parents and even I have been using failure as a whip to make myself run faster, harder, stronger.

In another experiment involving 11-12 year old French school children were given an anagram problem that was too difficult for any of them to solve. Afterwards, researchers told half the kids that failure is common and to be expected when learning. The other group was simply asked how they tried to solve the problem by the researchers. The group that received the pep talk scored better on further tests than the group of kids who did not receive the talk.
According to Jean- Claude Croizet, “Fear of failing not only hampers performance, it can also lead students to avoid difficulty and therefore the opportunities to develop new skills.”

It doesn’t just stop at school children. Jerker Denrell, a professor researching organizational behaviour, suggests that studying successes without also looking at failures tends to create a misleading — if not entirely wrong — picture of what it takes for a company to succeed. And for a complete picture it is essential to study failure as well.

According to Youth Sports Psychology expert Dr. Patrick Cohn, “Failure is very much a part of sports”. Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players says “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over in my life. And that’s why I succeed!”

So if failure is a big part of our life, how could you “normalize” failure for yourself and treat it and yourself more kindly?

By Priyanka Bhatia- Mahendru
The author is a Certified Life coach and can be reached at Priyanka@reinventioncircle.com