If fear of failure is really a fear of being unprepared for failure, how can we better prepare ourselves for the inevitability of failure?
This week things didn’t go to plan. I bought something. It wasn’t what I expected and then I got caught in the panic of finding a suitable alternative in time. Then, with a new plan in mind formed with the support of my partner, I breathed more easily and realised I had been totally caught up in the chaos of the moment. I had failed to practice what I support others with: proactively responding in the moment rather than reacting and being caught up in the situation. I failed at the subject-object move. Then I failed at leading with love.
And then I succeeded.
I succeeded in (if later than I would have wanted) responding to that array of failures in a calm, value-led way rather than reacting from a place of panic.
Yes, I hadn’t done the loop as fast or as smoothly as I want to be able to but without the experience and practice will I ever?
Which got me thinking about failure. Without the ‘failures’ I experienced I wouldn’t have found the broader success of practising the thing I want to be more skilful at and so without failure we cannot find success, which invariably means we have to experience failure.
There are many sayings that echo some of this sentiment and the value of failure: ‘fail fast’ in the start-up world, ‘success lives in the land of failures’ and so on… We can see, intellectually at least, the value of failure. Sport often talks of the best teams and players being willing to lose (failure) in the pursuit of winning (success)
Yet, fear of failure is one of the greatest barriers many people I work with, and myself included, have faced.
Both things can of course be true: failure is often essential for our growth and success (we learn to walk by repeatedly falling over and getting back up), and failure can be difficult.
So how can we practise responding to failure so we can be ready for the failures we will likely face as we find the success and growth we seek?
What are our perceptions of failure?
What you consider failure, how you feel about that and what makes something seem a failure to you will likely tell you a lot about you (what is important to you, what is scary to you, what you may avoid or find difficult) and identify the areas to focus on considering how you want to respond when they come up.
When you think of the idea of ‘failure’ what comes to mind? What sensations do you feel? What moments or events, past, present or future stand out?
What are the things you consider a failure and how do they compare to the things you do not consider a failure?
What do you do and don’t you do because of what you see as failure?
What is the impact?
For me failure is receiving negative feedback or not receiving the desired outcome, particularly around work, because it fuels the fear that I am not good enough, which fuels the deeper fear of not belonging, which is important because belonging means feeling safe and loved.
As a result of that fear I know I have avoided proactively pursuing opportunities or sharing my work or playing small, if you don’t proactively pursue them it is easier to put failure down to chance than not being good enough but the long-term consequence can be regretting not fully having a go.
When these failures and fears arise, how do you want to respond?
What will be the response that best supports you in what you want to achieve?
How can we prepare and practice for failure?
Practising responding to failure starts with practising how we set expectations, how we relate to failure and how we see our current response to failure.
Acknowledging the value and the cost of our default response to failure reminds us of our capacity to develop effective responses to failure
Realising our response to or avoidance of failure has served us as much as it costs us is the first step to developing responses that will best support us now. While the cost of that response may now outweigh how it did serve us, we learnt our approach to failure for a reason. Going back to my own example it helped me maintain a sense of belonging and safety.
It is important to see the service as much as the cost here, because otherwise it can be easy to be too self-critical of our learnt responses when a more accurate reality is that
We have developed strategies (often as children) to take care of us that have done so.
Now we want to develop new strategies that better take care of us alongside other things we want to take care of
That is to say we may miss the fact we are already halfway there as we have the capacity to create and implement strategies we just need to devise new ones.
What is the response that is most in service of what matters to me?
If you knew failure was inevitable, how would you like to respond to it?
What would be the most useful response for you?
What do you need to respond in that way?
Defining how we want to be is essential to practise responding to failure, equally crucial is considering what we need to enable that response, which comes down to how we see failure and ourselves in the face of failure and our expectations of us and the situation.
Reframing failure to not about who we are but about things not going as expected
Failure is binary when almost every effort is a shade of grey. I may cook a recipe and it does not fully go to plan or look like the picture in the book, but I have still cooked something. The team meeting may not go to plan but the team meeting still happened. I did not get the promotion but I still applied or got so far.
These examples could be read as excuses or lowering our own standards. If anything, they aim to highlight that failure is often shaped by our expectation or someone else's expectation. There may at times be objective measurements, such as performance metrics (they scored more points, we didn’t win, we missed our target) but how useful is it to simply label it as failure?
If we can reframe failure to ‘not going as expected or planned’ and disidentify with it (it failed/didn’t go to plan vs I failed) we create the separation to respond and to unpack expectations and plans.
It does not change the truth of the objective result but allows the learning that is the value of failure and can move us to considering the way forward rather than being demoralised or avoiding the prospect of failure in the first place.
The start-up mantra of fail fast is about quickly getting to the thing that works, its ethos is experimentation. How we see failure and reframing failure, as part of a process, not an end point, and how we relate to it, about things not going to plan, not about me, we can open ourselves to doing the things that may fail and to responding in a more useful way to those failures.
What are our expectations to start with? What are expectations around failure and success that really serve us?
We have written about expectations and metrics before. How much are our expectations setting us up to fail and succeed? The fail fast mantra normalises failure as a core part of success. Equally what does real success look like? We can risk setting overly high expectations and failing as much as setting overly low expectations to avoid failing, both of which are not necessarily in service of what we really want to achieve. What is the right level of success for you to aim for and how does it fit into the bigger picture for you?
It could be that success is getting as many ‘no’s as possible knowing that they are an essential aspect of getting the ‘yes’ you want.
Ultimately, based on how little we can control in life, failure, as things not going as expected, is inevitable, so how are we setting our expectations to accept or even ready ourselves for failure and the value of failure as an essential part of the process of getting to where we want to get to?
When we have clearer expectations, a fairer, kinder appraisal of our reaction to failure and a relationship with failure that sees it as a natural, expected part of our own growth we are creating the conditions for it to be easier to respond in a way that supports us to get to where we want to go and to try the things that may fail.
We can practise the elements that help us respond to failure outside of failure. We can practise expectation setting and appraising our performance in a way that aligns with how we want to respond (what went well, what can I do differently, what have I learnt, what can I celebrate). We can do this with a peer or in a journal. We can practise the affirmations and self-talk that embed the narrative you want to have about failure and you, for example things like ‘failure is a natural part of the process of growth and having a go’, ‘I did not fail, it did not go to plan and I can do x, y, z next time’.
The only way to learn to respond to failure is to practice responding, which means failing
While the above suggests a process that can make responding easier — pre-defining a response you want to have, being clear about expectations of success and failure and reframing failure — that process will only work and be refined through practice, which means failing at things and reflecting on how you responded.
What can you practice on that is both low stakes and likely to bring about failure to start mastering the loop of failing and responding?
What becomes possible when we can respond to failure well?
What would it be like to consider that each possible failure is a chance to get better at responding to failure and in doing so, enables you to do the things that you fear failing at the most but would make the most difference?
How can you practice failing and responding to failing?
What world would we create if we all had a more accepting relationship to failure? What would we do, that we no longer avoid, what would be possible, and who would we inspire?
