It is said that failure is inevitable and that it does nothing but extend our learning process. But what do we do with failure, how do we manage it, especially today when both competition and the social environment demand us to be perfect, almost flawless? Ways to constructively look at failure, both as leaders, employees, coaches - but also as individuals.

Nobody likes failure because that's how we've been raised: to be in constant pursuit of a chimera of perfection that, especially in today's world, is impossible to achieve. Changes and the need to learn have such fast cycles that the famous 10,000 hours you need to achieve to be able to truly master, to the point of art, a certain field have become something of the order of fantasy...

Failure, like perfection, are very relative notions to which we assign different meaning depending on our subjective evaluations and judgments that come, in the absence of very clear standards and specifically formulated requirements, from our set of expectations, of standards that we we fixate or interpret that have a lot to do with what others would think of us if we were in a situation where we make mistakes or fail...

Dealing with failure in a realistic way requires objectifying the situation in such a way that it does not lead only to negative reactions, anxiety or helplessness, guilt, continuous self-criticism, or even cynicism. Because none of that helps to solve the problem and doesn't help to get over the difficult situation and learn from it. There are so many people who have failed in college or a certain high school and then had the chance to do amazing things with their lives that they might not have done in the original scenario. There are so many people who have said that they had a failure in their relationship or marriage, but after overcoming the unpleasant and sometimes dramatic event, they were able to understand what kind of person is needed in their life to be happy.

We rarely prepare for potential failure. It is one of the scenarios that most people avoid considering, analyzing and preparing for. Although the reality shows that it is only one of the possible scenarios as well as the scenario of success, partial success or eventual postponement. Preparing for such a scenario could convert the future experience from a negative one to a learning one and actually contribute to future success without fueling the natural version of failure or failure. Something very pragmatic would come out of this exercise: the definition of what failure really means, that something that might be within my power but for which I don't prepare enough, that I won't use enough to get results, that I will not listen enough when it is given to me as feedback or information that could jeopardize success. And that's because by setting appropriate boundaries between what I can do autonomously with all my knowledge, dedication, perseverance and desire to succeed and what is not up to me, it will create the distinction between an experience that breaks me down or an experience from that I could learn something, could be considered an intermediate step to success and a source of lessons for improving the process or stages I will go through.

Some useful skills to develop for dealing with failure

Self-control and self-regulation of emotions

Failure is dramatic primarily because of our emotional reaction to the situation. Emotion, usually negative, has many sources related to our personal beliefs and values, or the assumptions we make about those around us.

We can be angry at ourselves or disappointed in ourselves, we can even be sad that we failed to cope. Good this kind of feeling that has behind it values ​​like responsibility or very high standards, strong values ​​by the way. But he also has the conviction that if we somehow fail to succeed, if we haven't thought of absolutely all the options and possibilities, if we're not good enough for the time being to face the challenge, then there's something wrong with us. Good, and this is a limiting belief that rather keeps us stuck in an unpleasant feeling that limits our self-esteem and reduces our confidence in ourselves and does not leave much room for the search for progress and the search for the next stage of development.

We might feel guilty or ashamed, emotions falsely socially maintained by a traditionalist mindset that doesn't allow for experimentation and doesn't see learning or achievement as a sum of intermediate steps in which, at some point, things might not turn out exactly how you planned them.

Regardless of this negative emotion, our ability to control and maintain the emotion in a range that makes us aware of the consequences but that keeps us open to continue and persevere, this capacity for self-control is a skill that is good for us - we train her. Self-control in situations that we perceive as crisis give us the possibility of emotional self-regulation and physical and mental return to a status that allows us to think and find solutions. Otherwise, negative emotion reduces our ability to make good decisions.

Modesty

Our society is not the place that usually promotes modesty. This is a quality of people who are aware that no matter how much they have achieved and how much they have succeeded there is always room for growth and development and there is always room for error or lack of experience in the context of change. Modesty fuels our ability to listen and allows us to gather multiple perspectives from those around us, thereby reducing our chance of failure by considering multiple points of view and properly informing the decisions we make.

Curiosity

Curiosity is a very interesting skill that we lose in the course of life and it is directly related to our ability to be creative and find solutions. Creativity seems to reach its maximum peak in children around the age of seven, after which as we enter traditional education and then professional life where we have to avoid risks and mistakes, it drops to alarming levels making us act on automatic pilot, and to use solutions that have worked well in the past for new situations that we have never faced thus increasing our chance of error and our sense of failure.

Sometimes we are not curious about the people we work with and their capabilities or talents that could be useful in the situations we are going through and where we want to avoid failure. We forget to be curious and look for perspectives by being too tight-lipped and inward-looking, to our ideas.

How can we use failures for our development?

Correct assignment of cause

This technique is one of the most useful in dealing with failure because it involves a systemic analysis of the situation and the problem and understanding the complexity in which you, your abilities, the decision you made, are an integral part of this system. Identifying those elements that depended on you and that could have been approached differently make the difference between positivism and negativism, between optimism and pessimism, between confidence in learning and helplessness.

The context can be unfavorable in many cases and the key is not to blame someone outside or the context but to carefully identify what belongs to our person in order to act. What was in my power? Where is the solvable boundary? These are two very important questions in the reflective process.

What kept me going? What should I address or change to get a different result?

Another important aspect concerns the identification of obstacles, and not so much the external ones as the limiting assumptions or beliefs that prevented me from doing better. The answers to these two questions give us the chance to find ways to change our own person without trying to forcefully change those around us.

And in this regard, I would like to mention here the power of a word that we often forget: "yet". It's something I don't know yet, but I could learn. It's something I can't do yet, but I could train. It's something I don't understand yet, but I might look it up. It's something I'm not aware of yet, but I could ask for feedback. It's something I don't have clarity on yet, but I might reflect.

Sense of humor

One of the best professional episodes I went through was my participation in an evening from the "Fuck Up nights!" series of events. For those who don't know, it's a global phenomenon and it also takes place in Romania, organizing evenings where various people are invited who in their personal or professional lives have had monumental moments of failure. Or that they thought so at the time. And, in a room full of about 150-200 participants, you are invited to tell everyone about this situation, how you made yourself laugh, and especially what you learned from that prank, things that could be useful to those listening to be able to avoid similar situations or to start learning about how we can get through difficult situations or mistakes. Think carefully about which episode to choose, because we all have several such episodes in our lives, but also because you want it to be something relevant that changed you and could change others too, opening their appetite to treat failure as a learning event. I learned from this experience that it is never easy to be vulnerable and authentic in front of other people, especially when they are your eyes and ears, and I also learned that a sense of humor and the way you manage to step back and looking at yourself as a likable character with all the compassion and empathy you show are the most important lessons life can teach you.

Published on Life.ro