Failure isn’t fun. There’s just no two ways about that. But what does that failure mean> I think that, particularly when mental illness is involved, it’s easy to leap from “I failed at [X]” to “I’m a failure.” But taking a step back, they’re not really the same thing.
Fear of failure
Fear of failure is common, but the reality is that it’s inevitable that we will fail sometimes. Whether we fail to complete a certain task or fail to meet a certain goal, we’d never get anywhere without failing along the way. The fact that you’re walking now – how many failures do you think that took when you were a munchkin?
I suspect that even if we think that we shouldn’t fail, we’re quite willing to tolerate failure in others, as long as the person isn’t being an ass about it. I would also guess that we massively underestimate the frequency of others’ failures. When others fail, we may not even notice. When we fail, a spotlight appears out of nowhere.
Experiencing failure
Failure is generally hardest when we’re failing at something that’s personally meaningful or relevant, like things that are steps along the way to other goals that we have. I think it also depends on how much we perceive we have control over a situation. Failing to win the lottery is out of our hands, so not likely to trigger a strong response.
If you do fail at something, what’s the internal dialogue that starts going through your head? What are the feelings that go along with that? There might be guilt at having let others down. There may be embarrassment or self-criticism, or even shame or self-loathing.
After the initial thinks and feels, what sticks around? Do you get stuck in the broken record of rumination? Or maybe you could do a post-mortem, figure out what went wrong, and use that knowledge to get moving again. An effective post-fail analysis is probably going to be focused on decisions, actions, and the role of external factors.
Failure as a person
Self-flagellation may feel well-deserved, but it’s not going to do much to serve you. Coming to the conclusion that you’re a terrible person, you always have been, and always will be, will just keep you stuck exactly where you are. Things like personality traits aren’t going to change no matter how many times you kick yourself, so that energy is better spent looking for a workaround, or changing your situation to make it less of an issue.
The idea of failure as a person seems like it’s particularly common in anxiety disorders. But failing as a person is a pretty broad statement. What would failing as a person look like? Dying? Crawling into a hole and doing nothing until you die? Being tossed in jail and having the key thrown away? Is there anyone in particular that you could think of that has failed as a person? Personally, I don’t think failure as a person exists in any sort of objective sense.
The role of mental illness
I’m not good with failure when it comes to things that are important to me or have significant practical consequences in my life. Other more minor failures I’m fine with. I don’t tend to generalize failures into overall failure as a person. I think the best way to describe my response is along the lines of fork theory – important failures feel like getting poked by forks. The bigger the fork(s), the more they hurt and the more energy they suck out of me. I conceptualize it more along the lines of an external attack rather than me as a person.
How I’m doing with my illness makes a difference in how much I can and am willing to tolerate. If I’m not doing well, I’m not going to submit writing to a competitive publication because I don’t have the internal resources to withstand the fork poke that’s always a reality no matter how good one’s writing is.
How I learned it’s okay to mess up
My maternal grandma was the major influence in my early life that modelled that it was okay to mess up. My family went up to her place for the weekend about once a month throughout my childhood, so she was a major figure in my life.
Grandma has always had a great sense of humour. She considers herself to be goofy, and has never taken anything too seriously. Quirky/weird was interesting in her world, not bad. She was the anti-perfectionist; she was imperfect and she embraced that. She also embraced it in my brother and me. She consistently demonstrated the value of being able to laugh at herself.
She definitely didn’t have an easy life, but she got through with humour and was always able to see the ridiculous side of things. While I don’t think of her as having the same influence in shaping my development as my parents had, the ability to laugh at myself when I mess up is definitely something that came from her rather than from my parents.
Facing fear of failure
An article from Choosing Therapy suggests these 5 tips for facing the fear of failure:
- Clarify what’s going on with your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours
- Reframe failure as something that can help you grow
- Give yourself permission to fail
- Take control by chunking big tasks into smaller ones
- Be mindful in the present moment rather than jumping ahead to the future
I think that framing failure as something that happens as a person rather than at a task is a mental construct that has the potential to do a lot of damage and really feed into mental illness, so it’s probably an important area to work on.
How do you tend to respond to failure?
A few quotes on failure
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” – J.K. Rowling
“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.” – Michael Jordan
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison
“A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.” – B.F. Skinner
Failure is particularly scary for perfectionists. The post What Is… Perfectionism is where you’ll find all things perfectionism-related on Mental Health @ Home.
I really relate to this as failure is something I always struggle with. My mindset is very much if I fail at something, then I’m a failure, and especially if someone else succeeds at something I’ve failed at, then I’m a HUGE failure, It’s such an unhealthy way to see yourself but such a difficult mindset to break free from. On days when my mental health is feeling pretty good I try to see past this and take the bigger picture, but in some cases that’s much easier said than done and I end up fixating on the bad stuff. It’s something I’m working on, but like everything in this area, it takes a hell of a lot of time. Thanks for sharing!
For me it tends to depend on the importance of the task and the amount of control I have over it.