The way we respond to failure - Parallels between GMAT and Life #4

Many people are afraid of taking a GMAT mock. Why?

Because they know that if they get a low score, they’ll be shattered. They’ll lose the motivation to study. They might just give up.

Why will they be shattered on seeing a low score?

1. They believe their current low score will mean they will always have a low score.?
2. Either they believe that even with their efforts, they’ll be unable to improve their score.
3. Or they do not want to put in the time and effort required to move from a low to a high score.
4. They believe that their low score means low intelligence. In other words, they define their intelligence by their score. “I am so dumb to score such a low score.”
5. They believe that their low intelligence means low worth. In other words, if they are not intelligent, they are not worthy of love and belonging.

Each of these three beliefs is an untruth.?

1. Your low score doesn’t mean you cannot achieve a high score.
2. That you never achieve a high score doesn’t mean you are not intelligent. GMAT or any other test assesses very specific skills. Just because you’re not good at these skills doesn’t mean you’re not intelligent.
3. That you are not intelligent doesn’t mean you are not worthy of love and belonging. You’re worthy just because you exist. The worth of a human being doesn’t depend on how intelligent, smart, or successful he or she is.?

If you stop believing these untruths, you’ll not be shattered on seeing a low score. Because you’ll know you can improve your score by making an effort. Because you know that even if your efforts don’t succeed in getting a high score, you have not been proven unintelligent. Because you know that even if you are proven unintelligent, you will still have worth. You’ll still be worthy of love and belonging.

Once you come out of these self-defeating beliefs, you will be ready to work toward achieving your goals by building your skills. In any case, this is what life offers - always an opportunity to work toward our goals. Whether we’ll achieve our goals or not, we don’t know. But in every moment, we have the opportunity to work toward our goals. And I believe that if we keep using every moment to work toward our goals, we’ll achieve more than we can ever achieve by bemoaning why we haven’t achieved what we wanted.

In life, too, we’ll find ourselves very far from our goals. We’ll find ourselves starting from very disadvantageous positions. Will we be devastated seeing that we are far from our goals? Will we spend our time worrying about never reaching our goals?

We are likelier to behave in these ways if we tie our worth to achieving our goals. Why? Because as soon as our worth is at stake, we are so afraid of losing that we may be paralyzed and end up not doing things that will take us closer to our goals.

If we don’t put our worth at stake and just observe that we are far from our goals, we can allow ourselves to try our best to achieve our goals. Doing our best is the only thing that’s in our control. And the interesting thing is that if we give our best, the best that could happen to us happens.?