FAILURE AND SELF REALIZATION

TWO FATHERS

In my senior year of my undergraduate degree, I hadn’t the faintest idea what I wanted to do with my life. To compound matters, my father, who is a very well-intentioned person, seemed to have a pretty clear idea of what I should be doing. Having done well as a financial analyst, my dad told me that I should “just try it.” He said this with the kind of tone that a friend would use when trying to convince you that the new food s/he is presenting you with will change your life. Months later, I found myself selling securities products as a financial advisor. Within the next few years this decision put me on a trajectory that included banking, automated clearing house transactions, and accounting. I was neither interested, nor competent to work in a purely quantitative environment where I also couldn’t interface with others. One day my boss pulled me into his office and essentially asked me, “why are you here?” He couldn’t have been more right. Every day that I spent crafting multiple-page Excel workbooks sucked a little bit of my life away, and it started getting to the point that I couldn’t be effective in my job and I couldn’t see a way out. When I decided to leave the company I felt defeated, and a bit ashamed that I had not become what my father had hoped for me.

Fast forward a decade, and today I too am a father. I see my 10-month-old daughter throwing caution to the wind to learn about, experience, and explore this alien world she was born into. As with any child, she frequently stumbles and gets hurt when something doesn’t go as planned. While I don’t want her to experience pain, each time it happens I see her learning, growing, and becoming more able. In the short term, these painful falls might be seen as a series of failures. But in the aggregate, I see my daughter transforming from one week to the next. The unfortunate reality that I have gleaned from watching her is that growth and transformation require pain and discomfort. I think back to my conversation with my father and know now that what he wanted for me was to try, and maybe fail, to take a risk and grow from the experience regardless of the outcome.

My departure from the financial space sent me in the direction of recruiting, and ultimately into coaching and organization development. Since I started working in this space, I have experienced awe, joy, appreciation, and an all-around satisfaction with my life and craft. I realize that had I not failed to meet up to my father’s challenge that I might still hate my job, and consequently, be dissatisfied with my life. Instead, each day I am helping other people be their best and ultimately realize their own passions and dreams. More than anything, I am thankful for that failure that set me on this path. I want to celebrate the failures in my daughter’s life that wind up making her the beautiful, fulfilled, joyful woman I hope she will be someday.

POLARITIES AND AVOIDING FAILURE

Often times when working with students or clients, I might ask what they want to accomplish. They frequently answer with something to the effect of “these are the things I want to avoid.” I’ve lost track of how many times the people I work with will answer such questions by enumerating their fears and what they don’t want to have happen. I get the impression that many people have spent so much time and energy avoiding the discomfort of failure, that they have allowed that avoidance to be what drives them. More often than not, I think that rather than drive them to succeed, it drives them to stay snuggly within their comfort zone. This is regrettable because to say “I am afraid of being unsuccessful” is often another expression of “I want to be successful,” only the language of the former is debilitating. If the fear of failure drives someone to simply avoid making mistakes, they might refrain from challenging themselves, knowing that to accept a challenge means to welcome the possibility of failure.

In his Ted Talk, Adam Kreek does a splendid job of illustrating what it means for him to regularly use failure as an instrument to gauge his limitations and push his boundaries. The difference for him is that he chooses to be happy when he fails because the learning from the experience enables him to be even more successful in the future. Similarly, Brene Brown presents some ideas in her own Ted Talk on vulnerability, where she suggests that being unwilling to be vulnerable might protect you from experiencing disappointments and shame, but will similarly preclude you from experiencing the full extent of the opposite of those emotions, like fulfillment and joy. What Ms. Brown and Mr. Kreek also seem to have in common is a willingness to forgive themselves for their own failures so that they can move forward to find a silver lining.

My takeaway from all this has been to keep an open mind and never be overly cautious, as there is much that I want to experience, many failures that have yet to shape me, and much growth left before I die.