Reframing How You Think About Failure

The word failure just plain frightens and immobilizes people, as if a failure somehow means you, personally, are a failure. It's that fear, that we will be proven less than we think we are, that stops us from trying and growing and can ensnare us in a trap of insecurity. There are four lessons I've culled from our conversations with executives and coaches that help me reframe my fear of failure:

1. Fear and Anxiety are Energy
2. Failure is A Necessary Step Toward Success
3. Failure is Not Personal
4. There is Dignity in Failure

Fear and Anxiety are Energy

The process of starting something new and risking defeat will trigger an emotional response.  How you interpret that emotional response determines whether it's a helpful or hurtful emotion. People who are conditioned for success treat those “feelings” as the body's response to challenge and channel it toward the exhilaration of learning and performing.  Your body “needs” that stress to stimulate desire, proper planning and productivity. That anxiety is your body creating energy to propel you forward. Make sure you channel it down the right path. Famously, Bruce Springsteen still feels anxiety inside, but what you see is passion.

“Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall." — Oliver Goldsmith, 18th-century English novelist

If you interpret those feelings as paralyzing fear or anxiety you are channeling your energy down the wrong path. You are likely focusing on the negative and exaggerating the difficulty of the task. Cancel that thought and know that the emotion boiling inside you is positive and helpful.

 “I myself have had many failures and I’ve learned that if you are not failing a lot, your are probably not being as creative as you could be. You aren’t stretching your imagination. So it is important that you realized that failure is the partner of success.” - John Backus

All this doesn't mean you have to be a blind optimist, pessimism has its place. Adam Grant recounted this story of "defensive pessimism":  

"Louis Pew is this incredible climate change pioneer who has swam the arctic and the highest lake on Everest to raise awareness about climate change... the way that he motivates himself is occasionally through defensive pessimism, which is imagining worst possible scenario and then freaking out and then knowing that actually motivates him to prepare harder." ~ Adam Grant

Failure is A Necessary Step Toward Success

Failure defines, motivates and is the basic building block of success. It reminds us to be humble, increases our objectivity and makes us tougher.

“Everything I’m good at in life, everything I do effortlessly and every success I’ve had, I started out doing it badly and struggled mightily to get from bad to good. Now it is easy.” - Maxwell Maltz

More than failure you should fear never trying at all. The greater success is usually not found in reaching a goal, but in what is learned along the way. Rather than fearing failure. Fear wasting away and never learning or growing.

"Defeat is a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent” ~ Merideth vos Savant

A friend of mind “failed” at starting up his own business, but along the way acquired skills that made him worth millions to other companies. Trying brings its own reward regardless of the goal. 

"It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is sin." — Benjamin Elijah Mays

If you're not failing in some way, you're not growing. When you fail to grow, you usually start to blame others when problems arise.

Failure is Not Personal

You are not your failure; failure is part of a larger process. Don’t take failures personally.  You didn’t fail; you took a very necessary step on the success ladder and learning curve.

Outcomes are rarely as important as we perceive them to be. We often imbue things with more importance than they really have because we put our esteem on the line. 

Your perceived failure will matter little a year from now and will likely be the very thing that motivates you toward ultimate success. That doesn't mean that you should "accept" failure or ignore its lessons. Feel the burn of failure, take the time to learn and adjust, then reset, readjust and recommit knowing that failure was just part of the process.

You will get another chance. It may not be the exact same opportunity, but a better one.

There is Dignity in Failure

There is great dignity in true failure, because it means you had the courage and self-confidence to risk defeat.  All great men and women experience rejection and failure on the path to success. No one captured the essence of this lesson more so than Teddy Roosevelt in this famous quote:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” - Teddy Roosevelt