What’s Your Relationship to Failure?

How do you relate to failure? Do you believe failure is an essential part of success? Or do you believe that failure is to be avoided at all costs? Recently, I asked the question: What’s your context to life? And I shared that people have different beliefs about life, and what we believe about life often shapes our experience of life. If we believe that life is hard and that only the strong survive, we will experience things in our life as hard, and we will feel like we are struggling. If we believe that life is a journey, we might be more open to different experiences and what we might learn from them.

How we relate to failure hugely impacts our openness and willingness towards risk taking and trying new things. If we see failure as something that is “bad” and that needs to be avoided at all costs, we will be less open to taking risks or trying things that are new, different, unfamiliar, or out of our comfort zone. However, if we believe that failure is part of the process, and that success without failure isn’t possible, we would be more willing to fail.

I spend a lot of time talking to high achievers, probably because I’m well acquainted with the world of the high achiever. High achievers tend to be really hard on themselves. They often also work really hard at maintaining their image of success and achievement, even when sometimes they experience no fulfillment in any of the things they are doing. I’ve had many a high achiever tell me how miserable they are, because they know they look successful on the outside, and yet, they feel like they are drowning on the inside, or they feel like if they were to simply give up or change course, they would disappoint and let down a lot of people.

I’ve also heard high achievers share dreams with me that they are too afraid to pursue, because of the debilitating fear of failure. They are terrified that they might fail, and that fear keeps them stuck on a hamster wheel doing what they know how to do, maintaining the façade of perfection, and feeling disconnected from their dreams. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why would we let the fear of failure stop us from pursuing something that might be deeply meaningful to us?

Well, your relationship to failure plays an important role here. See, if you relate to failure as something that defines you. Something that is personal, you will do everything in your power to avoid it. If you see failure as indicative that YOU are bad, wrong, not enough, or unlovable, you will not want to face failure. And this is the curse of the high achiever.

Somewhere in their young lives, the high achiever, received praise and positive feedback for their achievements, and they may have been reprimanded and punished for making mistakes, and over time, they internalised the belief that if they fail, they would not be good enough, and they would be unlovable. If we only ever get love and attention when we achieve, we start to connect our accomplishments with our lovability, and we start to create the false belief that we are only worthy when we achieve and accomplish. So, we spend our lives striving for achievement, so that we can know that we are loveable.

If we perceive failure as a threat to our worthiness, we will not want to fail, because no-one wants to feel unworthy of love. So, we will play small to stay safe. We will only take on what we know we can succeed at, and we will avoid anything that seems outside of our skill set or comfort zone, out of fear that we might fail and look foolish, or lose the love and admiration we tell ourselves we have carefully built up over time through our success and achievement.

Carol Dweck is the researcher who brought forward the idea that how we relate to failure determines how much we are willing to step outside our comfort zones. She is famous for coining the terms “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset”. You may have heard these phrases before. People tend to use them loosely without really understanding what they actually mean.

And you might think that a high achiever is someone who has a growth mindset. You might even believe that about yourself if you are a high achiever. I certainly did. Until I read Carol Dweck’s book –  Mindset: Changing the way you think to fulfil your potential – and learnt the truth about where my fear of taking risks came from.

People with a true growth mindset, do not feel threatened by failure. In fact, they would often invite failure, because failure is a sign that you are really on the court. You are actively engaged in life, and not merely sitting on the sidelines watching the game of life being played. See, to really be fully on the court in life, we must be willing to risk, and we must be willing to fail. There is no other way, because failure is the path to success.

We live in a society that focuses only on the shiny outcome at the end. We are so fixated on the end result, that we hardly ever slow down to consider what it took to get to the successful outcome. We are in awe of the success stories and the wealth, creativity, innovation, and brilliance of the superstars we read about in the media. And yet, how often do we hear the story behind the story? How often do we hear how many years of struggle and failure it took to get there?

Too often we don’t want to acknowledge that failure was part of the process, that there were many failed attempts, many nose dives, and times when we simply gave up, or felt like we were never going to figure it out. I find that high achievers especially, do not want to share their failures, because they feel shame for the times that they had failed.

And yet, when I look back over my life, without the failures, I would also not have had success. The failures were stepping stones towards the final outcome. I was failing forward really, even when I didn’t want to see it. Every failure, every misstep, taught me something and often shaped who I became as a result.

Now, the key here is that if I see failure as personal, I will resist failing, and I might not learn anything from my failures. However, when I recognise that failure doesn’t define me, it doesn’t only happen to a few people, it happens to all of us; when I recognise that true success depends on failing at things, because when I fail, I’m stretching outside my comfort zone, I’m doing something that is hugely uncomfortable, and that will really help me expand my skill set, that’s when failure becomes the path forward.

Someone who has cultivated a growth mindset – truly cultivated a growth mindset – has learnt to separate their own self-worth from their actions and accomplishments. They know that regardless of whether they succeed or fail, they are always worthy, they always matter, and they are always enough. They know that it’s not their accomplishments and achievements that make them loveable, but who they ARE as people. They are loveable because they exist, and because they are here. We are all worthy of love, because we all come from love. We ARE love.

Cultivating a growth mindset means you start to see how the path to success at anything is scattered with failures along the way, and that failures are a sign that you are actually on the court working your butt off to create something new or have an impact. Those with a growth mindset welcome feedback, because they know that feedback will help them get better and stronger. Feedback can highlight areas for improvement and can actually help us get to where we want to be faster.

The more we shy away from feedback, the longer we stay stuck where we are, because when we avoid feedback, we don’t know what we could be doing differently, so we keep trying at the same old things. And there is that famous quote – often attributed to Albert Einstein – that the definition of madness is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” That is what we do when we refuse to receive feedback on our progress.

I’m reminded by this quote from J. K. Rowling: “It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”

So, dear reader, what are you missing out on by playing small, or avoiding feedback? What are you missing out on by not being fully on the court? How have you succeeded at the small things by playing safe, but actually failed at the more important things in life?

The other day in a conversation with a client she shared with me that she knows that she will regret the things she never did more than the things she did do. What do you already know you will regret one day, because your fear of failure stopped you from taking action?