How we deal with failure

Failure can certainly be a salutary experience, but not one most of us want to encounter just for the ‘salutary’ bit. By which I mean: we certainly see how people are – really are – when they fail. After all, everyone tends to have a wonderful personality when things go well; it’s when adversity kicks in that we discover who has gumption, resilience, perseverance and other indispensable qualities. As somebody once said: Winners never quit, and quitters never win.

But we still like to ask the question, how do we deal with failure? What ‘trick’ is there for helping us cope with it? Many leaders find this difficult to deal with, and as for advice, the standard piece is: failure doesn’t exist so long as you learn from it. Hmm. This reminds me of the sort of advice that went out of fashion forty years ago, and was parodied twenty years ago, as the person broke down in a crumpled heap and some well meaning person says: Pull yourself together!

So, I would like to add my take on this question: which is to question seeing failure as a 'doing' thing. The action we have taken fails, so how do we respond to that? In essence, what do we do? This seems right and proper, but at another level failure is a 'being' state. The doing – the failed doing – is a consequence of the imperfect being. At its most chronic, self-esteem is depleted, is negative, and so any kind of success is impossible.

At a more moderate level we all perceive that other people have gifts and strengths that we do not – how we respond to that (emulation, envy, indifference, etc?) has a huge impact on the quality of our lives and our capacity to succeed. And at the profoundest spiritual level virtually all religious traditions have to accommodate the notion that mankind was involved in some aboriginal calamity early in its gestation, which accounts for the everyday condition of pain, suffering and uncertainty we find most of us in most of the time.

Thus how we deal with failure goes to the root of our belief system – and what we are going to become, or not. Our self-concept is our root belief about ourself. If we are going to deal with failure, then, ‘doing’ learning and not repeating mistakes is good. But better is addressing our core self-beliefs and asking ourselves the question: what do I believe about myself that is creating blocks in my life?