Surprising facts about failure
Understand these,
and you could turn difficult and painful experiences into constructive ones
You cannot always control whether difficult things
happen to you in life but you can control, to a large extent, how you react to
them. Failure makes your mind trick you into believing things that aren’t true.
Unless you learn to respond to failures in psychologicallyadaptive ways, they
will paralyse you, demotivate you, and limit your likelihood of success going
forward.
Psychologically speaking, the most important thing to
do after a failure is to understand its impact, how it affects your thoughts,
feelings and behaviours.
Failure can make goals seem less
attainable
In one study, people kicked an American football over
a goalpost in an unmarked field and then estimated how far and high the
goalpost was. People who failed, estimated the goalpost as being further away
and higher than those who had succeeded. In other words, failure automatically
distorts your perceptions of your goals and makes them seem more unattainable.
Your goals are just as attainable as they were before you failed; it is only
your perceptions that have changed. You can choose to ignore these new
perceptions, and you should.
It also distorts perceptions of
abilities
Just as it makes your goals seem out of reach,
failure also distorts your perceptions of your actual abilities by making you
feel less up to the task. Once you fail, you are likely to assess your skills,
intelligence, and capabilities incorrectly and see them as significantly weaker
than they actually are. Knowing this and correcting for it internally is
important because by making you devalue your abilities...
...failure makes you believe
you’re helpless
Failure causes an emotional wound. Your mind responds
to this wound by trying to get you to give up so it doesn’t get wounded
again—and its best way of getting you to give up is to make you feel helpless.
By making you feel as if there is nothing you can do to succeed, your mind
might avoid future failures but you will be robbed of successes as well—which
is why you shouldn’t always listen to your feelings.
A single bad experience can
create an unconscious “fear of failure”
Some people are convinced they have a “fear of
success.” They don’tthey have a fear of failure. In most cases, this is
unconscious, which means you’re not actually dealing with whether the fear is
real, reasonable, or likely. Which then means you’re also not addressing how to
increase your likelihood of success; you’re just trying to avoid feeling bad if
you fail. This unconscious focus on avoiding future failure, rather than
securing future success, leads people to act out.
You could be self-sabotaging
unconsciously
One of the most common ways people try to buffer
themselves against the pain of future failure is by selfhandicapping—creating
excuses and situations that can justify why they failed, like going to a party
the night before an exam and claiming they were tired or hung over; developing
psychosomatic symptoms such as headaches and stomach aches (which made it hard
to concentrate); or magnifying a small “crisis,” such as the need to spend two
hours on the phone with an upset friend, to justify why they were unable to
prepare for a job interview. These kinds of behaviours are often behind
selffulfilling prophecies. They sabotage your efforts and increase your
likelihood of failure. Another reason why you need to recognise this
unconscious fear is that...
...fear of failure can be
transmitted from parents to children
Studies show that parents who have a fear of failure
can unwittingly transmit it to their children by reacting harshly or
withdrawing emotionally when their children fail—thus conveying to them, often
unconsciously, that failure is unacceptable. This, of course, raises the stakes
for their children and makes them more likely to develop a fear of failure of
their own. Another impact this has:
The pressure to succeed
increases performance anxiety and causes choking
When a golfer misses an easy putt, a bowler gutters
the last ball, or a trained singer totally misses the power note at the end of
an audition song, it is because performance pressure caused them to choke.
Choking happens when the pressure to succeed makes you overthink something your
brain already knows how to do. As a result, you add an unnecessary “correction”
that throws your brain off and screws everything up.
A great way to overcome choking
is to whistle or mutter
By whistling or muttering while you’re taking a shot,
bowling, pitching, singing—whatever it is—and focusing on the task itself,
you’re stealing just enough attentional resources from your brain to prevent it
from overthinking and correcting something that doesn’t require correction.
While choking occurs in the case of automatic tasks like those involved in
sports or performance, another common factor that causes failure is lapses in
willpower—and those typically occur not because the person lacks willpower but
because you need to understand how willpower operates:
Willpower is like a muscle;it
needs rest and glucose to function best
Much like muscles can become fatigued when they are
overused, when your willpower fails you it is because it is over-worked and
undernourished. Our brains require glucose to operate and when they don’t have
enough of it, our cognitive resources (attention, concentration); our executive
functioning (planning, decision making); and our willpower, all begin to drop
or fail. That is why crash diets often end in bingeing—they deplete the
person’s willpower so severely that they lose their self-control all at once
and eat everything in sight. Therefore, be aware of how much effort and
willpower you’re exerting during the day and make sure to rest, eat a little,
and be ready to be more vigilant and to revisit your motivations when you begin
to feel your willpower fading. By taking control of your willpower you are
doing the one thing that is crucial to overcoming failure:
Focusing on variables in your
control
Failure can make you feel demoralised, helpless,
hopeless, and anxious (both consciously and unconsciously) but you can fight
back. Break down the task or goal in question to those aspects that are in your
control and those that are not. Then go through the list of aspects that are
not in your control and figure out how to take control of them—by improving your
skill-set, planning, relationships, knowledge, preparation etc. Now focus
solely on those aspects that are in your control. Feeling in control is a
literal antidote (to feelings of helplessness and demoralisation) that will
motivate you to try again, minimise your chances of another failure, and
increase your likelihood of success.
The writer is a Manhattan-based
psychologist. He is the author of Emotional First Aid:
Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure and Other Everyday Hurts (Plume),
available at amazon.in
| Dr Guy Winch MM26APR18
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