I really enjoyed this TED talk from Regina Dugan, the former director of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Who says we cannot achieve great things if we can overcome the fear of failure?
Failure
All posts tagged Failure
I firmly believe that to be successful you need to avoid one of the single most negative influences that can affect your progress – listening to other people. Many times those who have goals, dreams or aspirations to achieve great things share them with others they know. Unfortunately, more often than not the opinions we get from others will be negative.
Why?
The reason is that most people are trapped in their own fear of failure. That fear is an addiction and they want to make you a part of it. Do not listen. In fact, stop asking for the opinions of others unless you know that they have similar aspirations or are high achievers. Entrepreneurs tend to be this type of person. They see opportunities everywhere and are rarely negative. You need to choose carefully the people you talk to about what you hope to achieve. When in doubt keep it to yourself.
One of the things I’ve noticed most about highly successful people is their ability to control their emotions despite their ups and downs.
Why does emotional control matter?
One might think that you should always celebrate your victories, and simply focus on not getting down when you fail. However, I have found that you must control your emotions in both success AND failure.
In a previous post (http://bit.ly/KOFdelayedgratification) I introduced the concept of delayed gratification. The same principle applies when controlling your emotions. If you celebrate too much when good things happen to you, it tends to diminish your drive to continue to push towards your major goals. It can also increase your short-term expectations of achieving a similar “high” and increase the pressure to repeat that feeling quickly.
If you instead get too down on yourself when facing a setback, it can easily erode your confidence and lead to procrastination, negative self-talk and even depression or feelings of hopelessness.
If we learn instead to control our emotions – never getting too high, and never getting too low – we build a sense of inner calmness that can dampen the roller coaster ride we experience every day. We’ll build on our success without losing steam, and bounce back from failures without negative consequences.
Here are a few tips that have worked for me to control my emotions:
1. Separate yourself from the situation: No matter what happens to you, think about it as though it happened to someone else and you were providing that person with advice on their own emotional control. Then drink your own kool-aid. This really works.
2. Stop and breathe: It sounds simple, but when you sense your emotions are heating up you need to slow down. Take a few minutes and breathe deeply and slowly. You will feel a calm develop and it will help you to temper your emotion.
3. Practice: Ah yes. Don’t expect to be good at emotional control without practice. But, if you do practice you will see a big change in your overall success.
Here’s the reality. In your life you will face rejection. You might get cut from a team, dumped by a boyfriend or girlfriend, told you cannot be part of a group or club, lose a sale to your competition, or be turned down for a job. Rejection happens. What now?
How you answer that question, through what you do next, says a lot about what you will be able to achieve in your future. In fact, it can define it.
I’ll share a brief story. When I was in high school, there was a guy I knew who joined a group of other boys to form an intramural volleyball team. He was athletic, but he had never played volleyball before. His team played several matches over the next few weeks, and they were decent, but not great.
One day he was sitting at his lunch table and one of his teammates approached him. His teammate told him that they no longer wanted him on the team. “You stink” were the words used. The guy was very competitive and generally good at most sports, so this hurt in a big way.
However, he had a decision to make that could affect his entire attitude in the future. He could believe what the teammate said and be depressed, or he could channel the negative experience into some serious motivation. No surprise to those that knew him, he went with the latter and it shaped many things he would do in the future when faced with rejection.
In case you are wondering how it turned out, the guy went on to become an outside hitter on a AA volleyball team, played in four leagues per week, practiced and trained like a fiend, and joined a USA Volleyball traveling tournament team. He pushed himself to get the most out of his ability and had a great time enjoying the game.
Those teammates that rejected him in high school never knew – and that’s the way he wanted it. He didn’t focus on becoming a good player to show them they made a mistake. Who cares? He did it to prove to himself that he could channel that rejection into something positive. He has approached every future rejection the same way.
You will face rejection, and it can hurt. But if you want to achieve your goals, make the right decision about what to do next when it happens. That can truly shape your future. By the way, that guy from the story… it was me.
Why can’t we do things as adults like we played as kids – with reckless abandon? If you watch kids closely, they are really amazing in terms of what they will do and what they will try. It’s as though they have no fear. The idea of failure doesn’t seem to ever enter their minds. Sure they fail, but they get right back up as though it never happened.
Somehow as we grow up we are taught to fear things. We are told to be careful – a lot – and if we make mistakes we can often be punished, scolded, put on the bench, sent to our room, grounded…. you get the idea. These consequences can breed fear… fear of doing things wrong… fear of failure. Fear can lead to paralysis. How can we possibly achieve when the risk of failure and consequences is so high? We are taught to play it safe.
However, if we want to achieve great things, we need to take some lessons from our childhood and play with reckless abandon. We need to fail and get back up, like a kid.
What matters most is not the failure itself, but rather what you do AFTER a failure.
Here are 3 steps to recover from failure:
1. Think of failure as an outcome. Failure is a moment in time. It’s not a permanent state of being. Separate how you think about yourself from the outcome. Just because you experience failure does not mean that YOU are a failure. Having the right mindset is critical to recovering quickly from failure.
2. Resist negative chatter from others. If you fail, all kinds of people – naysayers and others close to you – will fill your head with things such as “I told you so” and “you should have never done that.” You MUST resist and tune out the negative chatter. It will offer zero help. Most of these people are trapped by their own fear of failure and are dying to welcome you to their club. Do not join them.
3. Move quickly on a new plan. While the failure is still top of mind, think (and write down) what you learned from the experience. Be objective, not emotional. Examine what you could have done differently. Then, immediately formulate a new plan and start to take action. Your failure moment will soon be in the rear view mirror.
Have you ever known someone who starts a lot of things and never seems to finish anything? Perhaps he or she joins a sports team, or decides to take music lessons, or commits to helping a friend with a project. Does the person quit before the season is over, stop taking lessons before the lesson schedule ends, or not show up to help out a friend?
In each of these cases, a personal commitment is being made. It’s not forever, but there is a reasonable time implied by the commitment. In the first two cases it is a period of time. In the case of the project the commitment is to see it through to completion. Think about what happens if you did not live up to these commitments. Some may think, what’s the big deal if you decide to quit after making a commitment? What if you just do not like it. Shouldn’t you have the right to walk away? Think about the answer to this question. How you answer it could define you for the rest of your life, and could set the tone for all personal achievement (or failure) to follow.
It’s easy to be a good starter, but it’s a lot harder to be a solid finisher. It’s easy to quit. It’s harder to remain committed regardless of the outcome. Ever know someone who was losing a game and just quit trying? It happens all the time.
However, to be high achievers we MUST honor our commitments. No excuses. We must do our very best to the end.
Those who get in the habit of making commitments only to break those commitments later will not only become quitters for life, but they will find that most people will not trust them to deliver anything they say they will. It would be better to not make a commitment at all if you knew you could not deliver.
Living up to commitments teaches us many skills we need to be high achievers. Things like being a great teammate, building trust, demonstrating good sportsmanship, being a person others can count on, setting a solid example around work ethic, being respectful of others, handling adversity, managing your time effectively, learning how to be resilient, and much more.
Next time you make a commitment, follow through. Finish what you start – every time. You’ll be glad you did.
To reach a high level of achievement there are a lot of things you need to focus on as it relates to your own attitude, your ability to harness fear, your persistence to not give up, and your capacity for bouncing back from failure. However, there is one often overlooked characteristic of high achievers, and that is the people who you hang around and invite as your friends.
This one factor can make or break the achievement of your goals.
Perhaps you are someone who desires to grow your career or make a lot of money. Maybe you hope to be famous or become the absolute best in a particular field. Suppose you want to make a significant difference through helping others. Nothing can hold you back more than the attitudes and behaviors of those around you.
Over the years I have learned that if you really want something, find others who share your beliefs, attitudes and interests and keep them close. Find the eagles in your interest area and fly with them. Don’t scratch with the chickens.
Get rid of the naysayers in your life. Find friends who are successful or share your views on success.
Those with poor attitudes who never aspire to improve their own situations will certainly not fill your mind with the type of support and encouragement that will help you achieve your own goals. In fact, their behavior and attitudes will rub off on you. They will destroy your mind, and kill your energy.
We have all likely heard the phrase “you are who your friends are.” Believe it. You’ll be amazed at how much you can accelerate your own success by surrounding yourself with the right people.
There are certain situations in life and in careers where you may only get one shot to achieve a particular goal. However, most situations we experience are not life and death situations. We do get second chances, and the trajectory of success is not always straight up.
To overcome the fear of failure you must not give up at the first sign of failure. If you do give up, you will only be further conditioning your fear of failing. That does not mean you should do the same things and expect different results, but you can change based on what you learn from failure.
For example, say a particular individual is interviewing at a law firm with the dream of becoming a great attorney. Suppose the individual is rejected and does not get the job. If the person looks at the failed interview as an indicator that he or she will not be a great lawyer, then the fear of further rejection will inhibit future success. The person could very well learn from the experience, change his or her approach to interviewing, and secure an opportunity at a different law firm.
While persistence will not overcome core talent and limitations in skills, giving up due to the fear of failure will not allow individuals to achieve their full potential.
Fear is a very powerful emotion that can lead to high levels of paralysis and inaction in our personal and professional lives. When naysayers tell a person he or she cannot do something, fear of failing tends to be amplified and false barriers to success are erected. If you look at a group of talented individuals, many times the only difference in their ability to achieve success is how they manage and control their fear of failure. Unsuccessful people allow fear to “own” their action. They make decisions based on the emotion of fear rather than looking at the true risks of failure.
One way to avoid letting fear “own” you, is to separate your emotions from the facts of a particular situation. Ask yourself the question, “what would I do if I knew I could not fail?” Write down all of the things that could happen, positive and negative, if you made a particular decision or took a specific action. Then, without emotion, evaluate the downside risk if things did not go as planned. Although you may reach the same conclusion to not move forward, the key will be that the decision was made without the emotion of fear.
Success is a Lifetime 