Giving Shape to Our Shadows: Facing Failure
"Fear of failure gets you little. Failure gets you a lot.” - Scott Carvin, Apple Fitness Trainer.
There is no lofty goal without a shadow of fear following right behind it. In chasing our goals, the prospect of failure can feel like we have a formless gremlin walking behind our every dream and aspiration.
But what if giving this fear a solid shape is the key to personal growth and success?
It’s human nature to want to run from vulnerability. Nothing is scarier than facing a reality of not succeeding. It's in this uncomfy space we might begin to confuse situation with identity: what if we aren’t simply facing failure, but we are a failure?
Remember, failure is an emotional experience, not an identity.
These uncomfortable emotional experiences often include the intense fears of not meeting a goal, “looking bad,” making a mistake, or trying something new and missing the mark. Failure feels like sinking, self-doubt, a gut punch, or “oh, *%@#!”
Yet none of these feelings are failures in of themselves – and, experiencing them may even be essential to progress. According to Harvard psychologist, Susan David, we build resilience when we face and embrace difficult emotions wholeheartedly.
To reduce anxiety around actual failure, we need to get clarity on what failure really means. When we make failure tangible, we make the fear of it much more manageable.
To give a personal example, when I started my business, I lived in constant fear of failing in the first year. Finally, I realized I had no clear measure to quantify failure - just a formless feeling that promoted anxiety, perfectionist thinking and exhaustion.
So, I decided, “this is clearly not going to work if I go six months making zero dollars.” Not only did that never happen, the clarity of what metric I’d need to meet to equate a failure decreased my stress and increased focus and energy on my goals.
I often ask clients with similar struggles: “What are the metrics for failure in your project, goal, or endeavor?”
Their response is hesitance at first - defining failure makes it real. But making failure real helps them take the action steps and calculated risks necessary to be successful. It empowers clients to focus on the true challenge at hand, not the unpleasant feelings surrounding vulnerability.
What I like most about getting clear on specific metrics for both success and failure is that they are entirely personal to you and your own vision, values, and inner voice. You alone have the power to shape what success means for you.
Too often in my clients (and myself), a fear of failure is rooted in a perfectionist mindset.
"In a meta-analysis, the average correlation between perfectionism and performance at work was zero." -Adam Grant, Hidden Potential.
Perfection is not a healthy goal in itself – growth is. When we have a growth mindset instead of a perfection mindset, we have more courage to embrace development gaps: the space between where you are now and where you want to be. Failure illuminates these development gaps and helps us to see where we need to improve. What skills do you need to develop in order to bridge that gap?
Bottom line: failure feels terrible, but has the power to propel us forward. It's an experience that brings you wisdom and resilience you'd learn no other way.
Give Shape to the Shadows: Increase Resilience for Failure
Reflect on an important goal, ambition or endeavor: name and write down any fears regarding failure. Then, identify your tangible metrics for failure in that pursuit - what would quantify a failure? What quantifies success?
Act: Break the cycle of nonproductive perfectionism. What is the next right action you need to take in order to achieve your goals? What small action will move you toward a success metric? When will you take that action?
Empower: It's the learning that puts us at our best, not the never failing. Remember; perfectionism only leads to frustration and burnout, but a growth mindset has increasing energetic returns that makes you more resilient in overcoming any failure.
My Resilience Battery workshop draws from these concepts and digs deeper into building key skills for resilient achievement.
I’d love to bring this session to you and your team in order to increase energy, effectively manage stress and avoid burnout in work, life and leadership.
Book The Resilience Battery Keynote Workshop or Webinar today.
