Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Making the Most of Failure
In the earliest days of my career, I had the great privilege of working for a truly remarkable recruiter. Ms. B, as I shall call her here, was highly focused, incredibly intuitive, an able relationship-builder, and when interviewing, was possessed of an uncanny ability to distinguish substantive talent from mere “smokescreen” faster than anyone I had ever met, then or since.
As part of my training, I was invited to participate (albeit silently) in several of Ms. B’s candidate interviews. One afternoon, in the course of telling his story, a candidate for a senior position of considerable responsibility revealed that he was an alcoholic in recovery. As a young and inexperienced professional, I remember leaping to the conclusion there and then that the interview was essentially over. We would never present an executive with such “baggage”, I thought, since who would ever hire a person with such an obvious flaw. Despite my silent assumptions and the executive’s awkward admission, however, Ms. B continued her questioning.
When the interview was concluded and the candidate had departed, Ms. B asked me for my views. I confidently explained that, whatever his other competencies, it seemed to me that the executive had disqualified himself from consideration given his admission. But Ms. B surprised me - - as she often did over the years - - with a different read of the same facts. “I disagree with your assessment that he has disqualified himself,” she said, “In fact, I think his decision to put this failing (which he could easily have kept to himself) on the table sets him apart in the areas of self-awareness, integrity, and guts. A person with setbacks, particularly when they have transformed those ‘failures’ into self-awareness and learning, are often the most impressive professionals of all. This man’s story is not his alcoholism; it’s his recovery.”
This lesson - - which I have carried with me for nearly 30 years - - is one that resonates for me, both personally and professionally, nearly every day. To be clear, and for the purposes of this article, I am deliberately defining “failure” quite broadly. Whether we are referring to setbacks in our lives, obstacles we could not overcome, or any other moment in which we felt we had missed the mark or fallen short of expectation, all these experiences fall under the umbrella of “failure” as I will use the term here.
Many writers enthusiastically champion the idea that ‘success is failure’, stoking the notion that we need only relabel our experiences in order to transform them. But author Carlin Flora questions this thinking in her article, “Challenging Success-via-Failure” (Psychology Today, June 26, 2015): “Within the fields of business and the arts, we are bombarded with the message that persistence pays off……(but) endurance and tenacity, admirable qualities though they may be, are minimum requirements, not guaranteed paths to glory. If you have devoted years of your life to a dream…..failing really, really hurts.”
I think Ms. Flora is correct. Simply trying to bury our feelings, to dress up our experiences of failure as if they were actually successes, or to ‘paper over’ the sense of loss and fear that often accompanies such moments is to set ourselves up for a repetitive failure experience. Costica Bradatan, Professor of Humanities at Texas Tech, in his book The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (Bloomsbury Books, 2015), explains it this way: “This rhetoric of failure…is an attempt at sugarcoating. Failure is brutal, ugly, and unpleasant. Whenever it happens, it is profoundly unsettling because it shatters your certainties; it makes you question your world, your worthiness.”
I will make no attempt to sugarcoat failure here. Indeed, having failed several times in my own life, including more than once in full view of the public eye, I am unable to recast my experiences as positive, uplifting ones. On the contrary, I was shattered, knocked down, and felt somehow less myself in the face of failure and found myself questioning my own beliefs, self-worth, and ability. Even now, when the positive fruits of my past failures are more evident, it would be difficult for me to chuckle over past obstacles or to see those days as anything but dark.
For that reason, I am not advocating a semantic shift or suggesting that we somehow bottle up the attendant feelings that accompany failure. Instead, I am suggesting we move beyond our feelings and look our failures directly in the face - - as painful, even excruciating as that may be - - in order to extract the learning that is an inherent part of every setback.
Failure as Mirror
The first such opportunity inherent in failure is heightened self-awareness. Failure shines a spotlight on us, often revealing aspects of our personalities or competencies that were previously unseen. It forces us to face aspects of ourselves that may initially make us uncomfortable, embarrassed, or deflated. It drives us inward and leaves us puzzling over the choices and tendencies and thought patterns that led to the failure in the first place.
When we drop our resistance to this process of self-reflection and instead seek to understand deeply the complexity of our motivations, ambitions, fears, and abilities, we begin to see ourselves more accurately. We are able to identify how our own choices brought about the circumstances we are facing and, by corollary, how altered, future choices might yield different results. When we decide to use failure as a mirror, we open up the possibility of new learning and, therefore, different outcomes. As Ms. Flora writes, “What escapes the ‘failure is the secret to success’ preachers is not just a more realistic way of honoring the prevalence and pain of failing, but also its true potential as a human, and humanizing, experience. Being endlessly told that you’re not talented enough to be a comedian is not necessarily going to make you funnier. But it might fortify something else, something that is harder to exploit and harder to identify, yet inherently valuable: your character.”
Consciously observing not just our feelings about failure, but the decisions and actions we take in response to it, can transform the way we see and value ourselves. As observation yields insight, we begin to see that the origins of failure are complicated, partially residing in ourselves and partially in circumstances beyond our control. We begin to move our focus from ‘what might have been’ or ‘what I should have done’ to what is and what I did. This focus on the reality in front of us helps to remind us that failure is part of human experience. In time, we may not only become kinder and gentler to ourselves as a result of looking in the ‘mirror’ that is failure, but also kinder and gentler to others. In short, heightened self-awareness often leads to heightened empathy. As New York Times journalist David Brooks writes in his book, The Road to Character (Random House, 2015), “We live in a culture that teaches us to promote and advertise ourselves….but that gives little encouragement to humility, sympathy, or honest self-confrontation”, the building blocks of character. “When rising out of the pain and humiliation of failure, one might first discover a new wellspring of compassion for others.”
Failure as Signpost
But enhanced self-awareness and empathy for others are not the only ‘hidden gifts’ that often come bundled with failure. Failure also can be the source of powerful new ways of thinking about our lives, our chosen paths, and our untapped possibilities. Sometimes described as ‘ah-ha moments’, these powerful messages can often become pivotal in our lives, providing us with the courage to rethink even our most fundamental choices, and to take paths we would once have rejected as being impossible for us.
As a young psychology student, I spent several months as a volunteer at a suicide hotline in a small college town. As part of our training, we were told to expect that many potential callers would see themselves as failures and would consider the circumstances surrounding that failure to be insurmountable. ‘Providing an alternative narrative’ was a key strategy for helping potential callers to step back from the precipice of suicide and see their circumstances in a different light. If, for example, a young woman called threatening suicide because she had spent all the money her parents gave her for tuition on shoes, we were taught to suggest bold new directions intended to disrupt the suicide narrative, rather than simply trying to persuade the caller that her parents would be understanding. “Since money is the issue,” we might have said, “and since you’re prepared to kill yourself anyway, why not rob a bank instead? You may be shot during the robbery, it’s true, but least if you’re successful, the problem will be solved.”
The idea, of course, was not suggest that felonious behavior is a solution to failure, but rather - - using a startling and unexpected idea - - to ‘shock’ the caller into realizing that there are alternatives to suicide. If we have eyes to see it, failure can remind us that alternatives exist for us as well. If our entrepreneurial business ventures have failed, the experience might point us in the direction of a different career alternative. If we tried to sell a major offering to a given customer without success, the experience might highlight our need to change our approach.
In her commencement speech to the 2016 graduating class of the University of Rhode Island, Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court, said, “The ‘ah-ha’ moment is the best way to gain an insight about yourself or the world around you. The ‘ah-ha’ moments are the ones that stay with you your entire life, the moment you realize things around you are not as they once seemed. Mistakes, failures, embarrassments, and disappointments are a necessary component of growing wise. We can learn more from our not-so-good experiences than we can from our good ones.”
Failure as Fuel
“Failure is success in progress,” said Albert Einstein. Once we have begun to slough off our emotional reactions to failure, to embrace the opportunities for increased awareness of self and others, and to glean from it the specific, future-oriented messages it contains, we may suddenly find that failure has become an impetus for change, forward movement, and reinvention.
Writing in Entrepreneur magazine (“Failure is the Seed of Growth & Success”, November 6, 2014), Zach Cutler observes, “Failure creates the moment when something is finally seen, found or understood in a way like never before. It comes from a buildup within our minds as the constricting thoughts of failure and fear expand. The expansion results in an explosive energy that breaks us out of constriction and into a highly energetic, creative state when things become clear and new insight is gained.”
This ‘explosive energy’ is perhaps the greatest positive outcome of our experience of failure. Like the mythical Phoenix, our future success is derived, at least in part, from the ashes of previous failure. Failure becomes the fuel that supports new thinking, a new sense of self, a new dynamic with others, and a new direction for ourselves. “Failure prepares us for what lies ahead,” says Cutler, “Entrepreneurs come across things they didn’t know they needed to know almost every day. Failures catalyze much of this knowledge because they are unexpected. Failure has a way of teaching us exactly what we need to learn.”
As with so much of Life, attitude here is key. As we have seen, suppressing or ignoring our emotional responses to failure can lead to paralysis, an inability to extract value from failure, and a vicious circle of self-recrimination, disappointment, and powerlessness. If, on the other hand, we accept our negative feelings about failure - - and the very difficult, often painful experience of failure itself - - but remain determined to move forward, to glean insights from the experience, and to leverage the lessons of failure in all our future undertakings, then failure is not the end of the adventure, but its beginning.
All of us have failed from time to time and, as admitted previously here, my own failures have been significant and hard to miss. By adopting a new attitude, and determining that whatever our feelings we will extract value from a seemingly negative experience, we can transform moments of failure in our lives into something positive and powerful. This more constructive approach to processing our failures empowers us to move beyond the short-term, debilitating effects of setbacks. Handled this way, we can ensure that rather than projecting negative messages about us, our failures consistently send a positive message: Watch This Space.
Chris van Someren