[Flash] Furlough the Failure

hmmm… I thought everyone was busy “celebrating failures.”

Professor Lauren Eskreis-Winkler explains, “We don’t like to focus on our failures – even if there’s value in doing so – because it makes us feel bad about ourselves.”

So what?

Researchers noted that because failure is ego-threatening, people aren’t celebrating it; they’re avoiding it. They’re neglecting that which could help them grow!

Here’s what the researchers concluded:

• Failure is a gateway to judgment and criticism
• Failure compromises our motivation to learn
• Failure lowers our confidence
• Failure causes us to tune out

As a result of the potential judgment, demotivation, undermined self-esteem, and stupor, we stop paying attention to anything that is not successful.

And paying attention is a prerequisite to learning! It’s impossible to learn from an experience and glean information about what caused our failure if we refuse to acknowledge and explore it.

And society isn’t helping:

• Schools promote perseverance, tenacity, and grit
• Social media applauds victory, triumph, and achievement
• Resumes highlight career successes
• Performance reviews advance accomplishments

After reading this report, I asked a friend to name some of her failures. She couldn’t think of any, even though she had been fired from a job and gotten divorced.

But then I asked her, “What about your mistakes? Have any of those?” “Definitely!” she laughed, and then we exchanged stories of our favorite mistakes.

Interestingly, in this conversation…

• “Failure” felt like an indictment of character, whereas “mistake” was simply a wrong turn.
• Failure was a label; mistake was an action.
• Failure was fixed; mistake was fixable.

So, what can we do about this? How can we grow despite our contempt for failure?

• Furlough the word “failure”
• Experiment with reframing words, like “life lesson,” “practice,” “experience,” “learning opportunity,” “growth moment,” “blunder,” “gaffe,” and “user error”
• Keep asking, “What have I learned?”
• Seek insights, not culprits
• Look to others and learn from their mistakes (it’s less ego-threatening)
• Engage a mentor and reverse-engineer results (not successes, not failures, just results)

We don’t need to celebrate or pay homage to failure; we just need to welcome the growth on the other side.

© 2022. Ann Tardy and MentorLead. www.mentorlead.com. All Rights Reserved.