Reframing and Reclaiming Failure
The fear of failure has plagued nearly every human, yet the opportunity to have challenges in life is an essential part of being human.
Failure is a by-product of daring greatly, which is a core part of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous Man in the Arena speech, and is the basis for Brene’s Brown book Daring Greatly. “The credit belongs to the [wo]man who is actually in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…” says Roosevelt “…there is no effort without error and shortcoming…who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
As I've gotten older I’ve witnessed people who have dared greatly and faced failure tend to be more kind. And, they appreciate the cyclical nature of life, that life is always evolving and changing. “This too shall pass” is a common mantra I bring into my daily practice that is a reminder that the fear and perceived failures I have today are but a blip in my timeline.
I have learned to embrace failure…because I’ve been able to reframe it, and embody this reframe deeper inside myself. That’s the theme of this week’s newsletter: Reframing and Reclaiming Failure.
What is Failure?
Failure is when we don’t meet a desirable or intended objective. Many people see this as the opposite of success, but the more we learn, failure actually contributes to our successes and is often outside of our control.
Failure can be caused by a number of factors, including lack of preparation, poor execution, or bad luck. It can also be the result of trying something new or challenging. Many processes strive to reframe failure such as Lean Startup (the Build-Measure-Learn loop is all about continuous learning and growth) or simply startups learn how to “fail” and pivot when something isn’t working. The way startup teams and companies lead reminds me of Dory from Finding Nemo when she says: “just keep swimming.” Dory reminds us that there is one thing we always have power over: our personal actions. She introduces a positive outlook on the idea that no matter how hard things seem, we must keep moving if we are going to get through it. Failure coupled with a positive outlook breeds hope, which is something that I think we all need to have more of with the regular barrage of negative news stories coming our way.
Failure can be a negative experience, but it can also be a learning opportunity. When we fail, we can learn from our mistakes and improve our chances of success in the future. Failure can also make us more resilient and determined to succeed. When we don’t meet our intended goals or objectives, it’s a redirection.
Tweet from @_Page_Turner
I recently found this Tweet from @_Page_Turner which states: “It’s not your fault that life didn’t go according to plan. You made that plan before you really knew what life was like. It’s okay to make a new plan once you understand. It doesn’t make you a failure.”
I think the thing that is really compelling in this is that often failure is a weight that we carry on our shoulders because we feel that we should have turned out a certain way according to the plan we’ve set for ourselves or often others set for us. For example, when we’re quite young many of us choose a major in college and that nearly locks us into a career choice from that point onward. We haven’t yet lived our life, and don’t know the cornucopia of things that are offered to us.
Life is a series of trials and errors, and then realizing why the trial you designed was flawed to begin with because your limited understanding of the world at that time. Now, you know more and know better. I recently had a realization that because I grew up in a dysfunctional household (with generational trauma) the plan I was working with was literally dysfunctional and was driven by the fact that I needed to leave that dysfunction and stop the cycle. And the real kicker is that because I am so comfortable with dysfunction, that without knowing I slowly sabotage functional environments so I can be more comfortable in dysfunction. Isn’t that some shit?
This awareness has been life-changing. Now, slowly but surely, I’m learning how to become more functional in my habits and planning so I can design for what I want and need, not for what the world says success looks like.
"Failure isn't fatal, but failure to change might be" - John Wooden
Triumph Over Failure
It has been four and a half years since a toxic work environment sent shockwaves through my body and life, and the following experience helped me to release that trauma.
A few weeks ago I re-joined about 100 people within the civic technology community for a happy hour called FailFest. It was a space for many of us to share stories of our failures to normalize and reclaim them. I went in thinking I’d catch up with a few old friends, meet a few new contacts, then quietly leave.
As I arrived a lot of past coworkers and members of the community greeted me with a warm welcome and bear hugs. Someone even called me a “rockstar,” and another person thanked me for laying the foundation for work to come after me. In the corner of my eye I see one of the organizers doing a B-line to me with the clipboard-- he handed me it and encouraged me to sign up to tell my story. He said “I know you have a failure story to tell.” …I wasn’t sure to take that as an insult or a compliment.
I wasn’t keen on telling a story I have not prepared for, or a story of workplace trauma that I experienced in front of 100 people. I waffled, and they wrote my name as just “Amy” as if I was a celebrity with just one name like Oprah or Madonna. I quickly created a story structure with key moments in my head, and told myself that when they called my name I would decide if I would tell or not.
Sure enough, they called my name. I took one last swig of my drink and walked to the mic. That moment felt exactly like when you are going up an incline of a rollercoaster. I’m strapped in and hearing the click of the metal around me and I’m readying myself for the drop that will come with the emotional rollercoaster I’m about to go on. But this time there was no drop---there was no screaming, it was a smooth ride to the finish. I cracked a few jokes and owned the room.
As I was telling this story I felt transformed--the pangs of trauma no longer had a hold on me, and I felt liberated from it. For the first time ever, it was just something that happened to me, not something I felt ashamed for or it was my fault. I finally knew what embracing failure felt like and true acceptance of where I am today.
I ended my story saying that I was grateful for this experience, because it made me who I was today. It has forever changed the way I view and tell this story, and set me on a healing journey. It liberated me from so many things I was carrying and now I’m able to see things more clearly. I was able to see everything with new eyes and gratitude for the healing journey I have been on, and the community that sees me for who I really am.
It helped me realize that we leave imprints on people we don’t even recognize, and the imprints from past experiences stay with us for many years. From these experiences I have complex post traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), anxiety, which sometimes leads to depression. Some days this cocktail of disorders sidelines me, and on this particular day I was able to see the rays of light shooting out behind the clouds.
Want to watch me tell this story? Check out this video on the interwebs.
Learning Corner
Failure = Information = Fewer Tasks?
Toni Morrison said that “failure is just information.” In other words, instead of beating ourselves up over our setbacks, we can use them to improve. A recent paper by psychologists Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach echoes this idea.
The researchers “find that the information in failure is often high-quality information that can be used to predict success.” But it’s hard to extract data from failure for many reasons, one being that the information in failure isn’t as straightforward as the information in success. For example, if you win a soccer game, it’s easy to know what you did right. You scored a goal, you ran fast, you were a great dribbler. Next time, do that again. But if you lost that game, it’s harder to diagnose the problem. Maybe you weren’t fast enough or maybe your defense wasn’t good enough. It’s hard to really pinpoint what you need to do differently the next time you play.
So how do we break this barrier? “Allocating more time to learning or engaging in fewer concurrent tasks may improve peoples’ ability to learn from failure,” the researchers write. In other words, free up your mental bandwidth so you can focus on the task at hand. Going back to our soccer example, that might mean trying to improve a single area at a time. It’s easier to extract the information you need from failure when you’re not trying to do too much at once.
How to Reclaim Failure
Failure is a part of life. Everyone experiences it at some point, and it can be difficult to deal with. However, it is important to remember that failure is not the end of the world. It is just a momentary setback, and it can be an opportunity to learn and grow.
There are many ways to reclaim failure. One way is to view it as a learning experience. What went wrong? What could you have done differently? Once you understand what went wrong, you can make changes to improve your chances of success in the future.
Another way to reclaim failure is to see it as an opportunity to grow. Failure can teach you about your strengths and weaknesses. It can also help you develop new skills and strategies. When you view failure as an opportunity to grow, you can use it to become a stronger and more successful person.
Finally, it is important to remember that everyone fails. Even the most successful people in the world have failed at some point. The key is to not let failure stop you from trying. Keep going, learn from your mistakes, and you will eventually achieve your goals.
Here are some additional tips for reclaiming failure:
Allow yourself to feel your emotions. It's okay to be disappointed, frustrated, or even angry after a failure. Just don't let these emotions consume you.
Don't dwell on your failure. Instead, focus on what you can learn from it and how you can improve.
Talk to someone you trust about your failure. Sometimes it helps to talk to a friend, family member, or therapist about what you're going through.
Don't compare yourself to others. Everyone is on their own journey, and everyone fails at some point.
Celebrate your successes, no matter how small. It's important to recognize your accomplishments, even if they're not perfect.
Keep trying. The only way to overcome failure is to keep trying. Don't give up on your dreams.
Activity: The Failure Reframe
One of my favorite books is Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life By Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It’s through reading this book that the idea of reframing failure really set in for me. I had talked about it for years as a director of innovation, and through reading their words--and doing the exercises in the book, I felt it a bit deeper.
Failure allows us to learn about ourselves and the people and world around us. Burnett and Evans say we should strive to attain failure immunity, and the way to do that is what they call the “failure reframe.” Below is their exercise for logging, categorizing, and reframing failures, which can help us reach that goal.
It's easy for us to describe the lofty goal of attaining failure immunity, but getting there is another matter. Here's an exercise to help you do just that — the failure reframe. Failure is the raw material of success, and the failure frame is a process of converting that raw material into real growth. It's a simple three-step exercise:
1: Log your failures.
Just write down when you mess up. You can do this by looking back over the last week, the last month, the last year, or make it your All-Time Failure Hits List. Any time frame can work. If you want to build the habit of converting failures to growth, then we suggest you do this once or twice a month until you've established a new way of thinking. Failure frame is a healthy habit that leads to failure immunity.
2: Categorize your failures.
It's useful to categorize failures into three types so you can more easily identify where the growth potential lies. Screw Ups are just that — simple mistakes about things that you normally get right. It's not that you can't do better. You normally do these things right, so you don't really need to learn anything from this — you just screwed up. The best response here is to acknowledge you screwed up, apologize as needed, and move on.
Weaknesses are failures that happen because of one of your abiding failings. These are mistakes that you make over and over. You know the source of these failures well. They are old friends. You've probably worked on correcting them already, and have improved as far as you think you’re going to do. You try to avoid getting caught by these weaknesses, but they happen. We're not suggesting you cave in prematurely and accept mediocre performance, but we are suggesting that there isn't much upside in trying to change your stripes. It's a judgment call, of course, but some failures are just part of your makeup, and your best strategy is avoidance of the situations that prompt them instead of improvement.
3. Identify growth insights.
Growth opportunities are the failures that didn't have to happen, or at least don't have to happen next time. The cause of these failures is identifiable, and a fix is available. We want to direct our attention here, rather than get distracted by the low return on spending much time on the other failure types.
Identify Growth Insights:
Do any of the growth opportunity failures offer an invitation for a real improvement?
What is there to learn here?
What went wrong (the critical failure factor)?
What could be done differently next time (the critical success factor)?
Look for an insight to capture that could change things next time. Jot it down and put it to work. That's it — a simple reframe.