SUCCESS REQUIRES FAILURE

A friend of mine built a very successful company, sold it for a substantial amount, then took some time off to get his MBA at Harvard Business School. Ironically, for years after getting that degree, he wasn’t able to make a penny in business.

He had become too careful, too wary of failure.

Who likes to fail? I don’t. Failure can feel humiliating. But if we’re not willing to risk failure, we won’t be able to make the bold moves necessary to really succeed, either.

Learning to deal well with failure is a skill. It’s something that we can learn, practice, and master. Not that anyone wants to become a master at failure; we want to become masters at dealing with failure… and masters at learning from our failures.

Our failures can be more effective teachers than our successes; and with understanding and practice, we can learn to make the most of them, even turning those failures into triumphs.

Learning to Fail

Where many of us get stuck is that instead of learning from our mistakes and changing our behavior accordingly, we stay stuck in the emotions of failure, ruminating on past mistakes. I have had clients who have spent decades reliving past failures in their mind – not learning to do things differently, just feeling the awful feelings over and over.

This is not the way to deal with failure. Those awful emotions change when we change our behavior, so that we can face the next challenge more effectively.

There is a solution to this from Carol Dweck’s work on Mindset: A fixed-trait mindset defines our strengths in terms of inborn gifts or shortcomings; it is based on the idea that we have a set amount of talent and ability, for better or worse. In contrast, a growth mindset is focused on what we do with our talent and ability. The growth mindset is much more desirable; and with some conscious awareness, we can choose which of these we use.

With a fixed-trait mindset, our positive self-concept becomes fragile. Because we feel at the mercy of whatever talents we have been given, we are in a passive relationship with our success or failure. When we fail at something, our intelligence, talent, or other inborn gifts are thrown into doubt, and our inflated self-concept can be crushed.

This translates directly to behavior: a person with a fixed-trait mindset will tend to avoid challenges, give up easily, and collapse in the face of failure.

Failing Takes Practice

But by looking for such assumptions in our own thinking, and purposefully facing failure as something from which to learn (and by teaching our kids to do this as well) we can turn a helpless position into an active, problem-solving approach to our success or failure.

Sports can be a great teacher of this skill. I’ve played water polo for many years, through college and now at the master’s level, and when I play, I know that sometimes I’m going to fail. It’s inevitable. As a goalkeeper, any time the other team scores, I’ve failed. It’s all or nothing. Either I stop the shot and succeed, or they score and I lose. The game goes on regardless of how I deal with it.

Over the years, I have failed literally thousands of times… and so have my opponents.

Being able to fail and continue to play with the same level of intensity and focus is what builds resilience, and makes the game so much fun. But it’s not just dealing with failure that’s important; it’s being able to learn from that failure.

Failure is about learning; it is feedback from the world that can help us to succeed, by showing us what doesn’t work.

The next step is to look for what would work better next time. Here are five steps for turning failure into triumph:

• Acknowledge the failure, and accept your role in it. Don’t blame or deflect your responsibility onto someone else – or onto events. Look to your own role with compassion, but without illusions or denial.

• Notice how you talk to yourself about it. Do you hear fixed-trait terms in your thoughts? ("I’m just no good at this; I’m not a person who has the talent for this…") If so, catch yourself, and change these words into growth terms ("I didn’t prepare well enough for that presentation;" "I need to learn more about this product in order to market it effectively…")

• Look for opportunities to learn from the experience.

• Where appropriate, make amends to people you may have let down.

• Having learned what you need to, don’t dwell on the feelings. Though you will feel them, don’t indulge them. They are there to remind you not to make that same mistake again. If you’ve learned the lessons, and sought to set things right, those feelings have served their purpose already.

While none of us enjoys failure, we can use the pain of failure as motivation to change our behavior… This is what can lead us to future success – and in doing so, we can grow a more friendly and resilient relationship with ourselves as well.

Joel is at www.drjoelwade.com.

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