People Are Not Their Failures
Retraining your brain to redefine things.
Failure can come to define a person. It could change everything in their life and become a turning point. But people are not their failures.
A failure is just an event in the life of a person. Everyone doing anything worthwhile will experience it. The degree and level of failure we experience could be different. But how we choose to translate it is up to us.
I recently did something that I am not particularly proud of. I defined someone by a failure in their past. A failure in behavior that affected me personally. I didn’t even know how much I was affected by this person’s behavior until I came face to face with an opportunity to speak about him.
In speaking about him, I realized that I still saw him a version of the person I had experienced years ago. But what if that version had changed? What if he is no longer the unfocused entrepreneur with shiny object syndrome that I knew him to be? What if he had become more deliberate in his actions?
I worked for a guy I’d call Mike years ago. The company he lead had a vision. But his execution was all over the place. He could not stay focused on the business in front of us. After a while, I began to feel like I was being led by a con artist. Who was great at talking and getting people to galvanize around his cause (I give him credit for this by the way). But never delivering on the promises he laid out.
I am a very driven person, so this was frustrating. I never got paid for a day, I never even got dismissed either. My role just petered out as he continued to chase any and everything that was in front of him.
I defined him by the failures he had when I worked closely with him. I had mentally tagged him as unfocused and unreliable. He was so good with words that I felt he poisoned everyone he spoke with.
But this happened five years ago. What if he’s changed? I didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt when I spoke about him.
I know we do it often, and sometimes it is done to us. people define us by a version of ourselves that we may have evolved from. It is the way our brain is wired to process information.
Our brain studies patterns and behaviors and draws a conclusion on what to expect. So if a person consistently acts friendly and nice our brain says, “she’s friendly and nice”, so expect her to be friendly and nice. And whenever she isn’t acting accordingly, our brain translates it to be an anomaly. That’s why when a friendly and nice person acts mean, we’d ask “what’s wrong?” because it is out of the norm.
This is your brain's way of protecting you from getting hurt.
But when we hold people to a version of themselves where they have underperformed or failed. We define them by that. But people are not their failures. We need to allow people to evolve, even in our minds. We need to update the way we view them in our mind, whenever we get the chance.
If you meet an old lazy friend Bob you knew five years ago, could you open your mind to the fact that he may have shaped up his act and become hardworking?
It is going against the way our brain is designed to unlearn something old to relearn something new. But with practice, we can retrain our brains to process things differently.
I know I wouldn’t want people to retain an older version of myself, and define me by my failures. I am constantly evolving and it could be hard for people to keep up.
Today I could be a struggling entrepreneur with poor emotional intelligence, tomorrow I could be an emotionally mature CEO of a fortune 500 company.
So don’t define people by their failures. It’s just an event in their life. Allow enough room for people to evolve in your mind.
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