The positive side of failure
What are you thinking when you think about failure? Most of us associate failure with something negative. But perhaps the most negative thing about failure is our attitude towards it and the way we deal with it.
Failures bad image
Especially in the German society failure has a bad image. People do not talk about it and if they do, only about the negative sides. We are quick to condemn ourselves and others for failures, forgetting that we are all human beings and that failure is part of it.
When a child learns to walk, it rarely works from the beginning. Mostly children fall down very often until they can walk. Fortunately, children seldom stop learning to walk just because it didn’t work out once and fortunately, parents seldom condemn the child because the walking didn’t work out the first time. On the contrary, parents encourage their children to keep trying until it works. But as adults we are ashamed of our faults, we try to hide them and don’t see the chances they give us.
When I failed in the past, this is what usually happens: My heartbeat increased, I felt bad and tried to curl like a hedgehog hoping that the problem and the feeling it caused would go away. Not a good strategy! So I dealt with faults and failure culture and discovered the positive side of failure. Because a failure is first and foremost one thing: an opportunity to learn and grow.
Failure as an opportunity to learn
If you take a closer look at failure, you first have to see how failure arises. Maybe you are careless or inattentive, or maybe you just didn’t know better and tried something new and that in itself is something positive. If a failure happens out of carelessness, it shows you what you should concentrate on and you learn to set your focus better or that you have to set your focus and can’t do everything at the same time. If the failure happens because you did not know better or because you tried something new, then you know better now or at least you already know how it does not work, which rules out a possible method.
Furthermore, failures show us where we have to look more closely, where we have to reflect and where we have to change something to turn into a positive result.
In most cases the faults we make are not as bad as we think. And even if they are, the fault has already happened and can rarely be undone. To fret about it is of little use. Rather, we should focus on why the fault happened and how it could have been avoided. And the next time we fail in a similar situation we will have more information about how not to do it and we will have identified another wrong approach.
Of course failures are important and yes, they have negative consequences and these should be taken seriously. But it is not helpful for anyone if you just feel bad about it. A failure is a clear indication that something has to happen here. If it feels bad, then it is mostly important so you should focus your concentration on what you can learn from this failure. And because it is important, you should do it as soon as possible. Otherwise you risk to fail over and over again for the same reasons. And Albert Einstein already said (or maybe not, the internet is not sure about it) “the definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results”.
How to deal with failure
Here a suggestion how to deal with failure:
1. Stocktaking: What happened? Why did it happen? What are the consequences? How do I deal with it? And how bad is it actually?
2. Damage limitation: Once the consequences have been determined, the question arises whether there is anything that can be done to improve the situation. In most cases it is recommended to stand up for your faults and to consider what is necessary for a short-term improvement.
3. Long-term improvement: What can I learn from the situation? How could the mistake have been avoided? What will I do next time in the situation that causes the failure? And what does my failure culture look like?
4. Do better :-). And if it still comes to failures the cycle starts again until you find the right way.
And finally: not only you can learn from your failure, others can too. So talk about your failures so that others do not have to make the same ones. And especially emphasize the positive side of it, what you have learned from your failure. So in the end something positive for others can come out of it too.
