Sailing through failings

“Failure is a stepping stone to success”
“Failure is the mother of success”

Such trite phrases are often used as encouragement against failure. Failure is considered to be an inevitable occurrence at all points of life. People are persuaded to accept failure and learn from it so that things can be fixed the next time. In the business  world especially, there are many failures to success stories and sometimes even the other way round.

Intuitively or perhaps because of conditioning, we all have positive associations with failures of others, with the classic underdog story. We are in awe of people who fail a hundred times but somehow succeeded in the end. We praise the value of success, applaud courage and persistence. But what happens when we fail?

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Our own failures seem like a hit to our pride, our self esteem and are painful and humiliating. A lot of cognitive distortions i.e. thoughts and thinking patterns that lead to faulty and negative appraisals of situations occur. 

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Some common cognitive distortions one can associate with failure are:

➢     Overgeneralization -  One instance of failure is generalised across all situations. A sales executive who fails to procure a client might believe that he lacks the ability to be on the client facing side.

➢     Should Statements - This involves holding a set of expectations that we force ourselves to adhere to. These standards are unrealistic and difficult to meet and in the context of failure, distortion would look like: “I should not fail”, “My work should be perfect,” etc.

➢     Personalization - This is when we take things too personally and blame ourselves excessively for perceived faults and failures.

➢     Filtering - This involves taking an event and magnifying all the negatives and discounting the positives. A recruiter who was unable to meet their target might go over their mistakes again and again instead of considering the value add that they’ve provided to the organization by recruiting a few good candidates.

Keeping in mind that people react negatively to their own failures, scholars and psychologists have attempted to understand the right way of responding to failure whether it is us who is facing failure or someone else. The first thing that is required, writes Peter Bregman in his Harvard Business Review article, is to show empathy. Though it is easy to give advice, make someone feel better and to help them improve,  empathy is more effective. People need to feel that they are understood and that their feelings are being validated. Self compassion is extending warmth, kindness and empathy towards ourselves when faced with shortcomings. And what does empathy and compassion lead to? Reduced fear of failure and an emphasis on learning from failures rather than directing energies towards avoiding failure.

Another aspect that greatly impacts how failures affect us is our appraisal of it. Appraisal of situations impact our behaviour so negative appraisals of failure i.e. considering it to be stressful and humiliating leads to feelings of grief and loss. Specifically, when failure is associated with a decline in self esteem, it leads to higher feelings of grief. One can consider this as a pattern that goes as follows

Pattern 

Thus, coping takes the centre stage here. Coping refers to the constant effort that we have to undertake, cognitively and behaviourally, in response to situations that are externally and internally demanding and that which exceed our resources. Coping can help reduce grief reaction as well as fear of failure. One can choose to cope in the following ways:

➢     Positive Appraisal - Reframing a situation so that the positive aspects are highlighted increases the positive emotions that are experienced

➢     Problem Focused Coping - This involves attempting to solve the distressing situation or problem by gathering resources, understanding the problem and searching for viable solutions.

➢     Emotion Focused Coping - The focus is on reducing the emotional impact of failure by seeking social support, distracting oneself or managing emotions

➢     Meaning Focused Coping - Seeking for meaning in a distressing situation, applying personal values and strengths to the situation, finding purpose within the situation can reduce the impact of the failure

It is necessary to go beyond reactions to and coping with failure. Failures can provide opportunities for learning. For one, when engaging in an activity, we experience and understand certain things which can inform later engagement and learning. This is called transfer of learning and it enables us to ask relevant questions, focus on the important information and can lead to deeper learning. Thus, failures are rich sources of information that can lead and improve future learning. Similarly, our metacognition i.e. an awareness of our own thoughts and thinking processes also play a role here. Failing helps us understand the gaps in our knowledge, the faults in our thinking, what strategies of ours failed and what can be used instead.

Thus, the phrases and proverbs about failure do hold a lot of truth though they fail to explain the mechanisms behind it. Having a scientific understanding of failure can perhaps helps us change our biases and prejudices surrounding our failures and consider it as a routine part of life and work, that provides one benefit that success does not. Learning.