I worded the title of this blog to capture the attention of people who do believe their mistakes are failures, but in all honesty, I don’t believe mistakes are failures. And I’d like to explain to you my reasoning for that plus in a future blog give you some tips on coping with perceptions of failure. For now I just want to convince you that using the word failure, for any reason, is a mistake.
I think the key to changing ones perception of how to think about failure is to first look at the literal description:
Failure: The condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends.
Okay, well I can’t argue with that definition. If you set out to be a multi-millionaire and fall short of that, then by the literal definition, you have failed. But wait, doesn’t that just mean that failure is not achieving a goal? Well, wouldn’t the answer then be to set your expectations lower? By that tactic, you would never fail. If your idea of success is to wake up every morning and be alive, then everyday is a success. It means that success is technically in your control as you define the parameters of that success. It would be nice if it worked like that wouldn’t it? But certainly, lowering our expectations can be difficult when we are so convinced they should be of a certain standard.
When thinking about failure I don’t think human beings are literal about the definition of the word. I actually think failure has an extremely heavy emotional weighting. So like a good scientist I double checked my gut feeling on this by looking up a study of the affective value of certain words. I found that the valence, or ‘mood’ of the word failure trended towards the negative. To put it simply, it just means that we interpret the word ‘failure’ as ‘bad’. As for the arousal value of the word (or way it affects peoples sympathetic nervous system — the system involved with panic and anxiety), it was 2.81 standard deviations across a normal sample mean. For those non-statistic geeks. It just means in a large sample of words, the word ‘failure’ tends to affect us more than the other 99% of words. Amazing, huh?
So while it may be correct to call a mistake a failure, it certainly is not helpful to call a mistake a failure. Why?
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I can, as an adult with ADHD, understand this trap of “failure” thinking. I’m in college, take my classes online. I can only manage 2 classes at a time. I recently took a class where I had to analyze readings every week, but it seemed like everything I turned in came back with comments like “you should have done more of this,” “wasn’t bad but…”, and each time points taken off for the assignment not being “quite good enough”. By half way through the course, I wasn’t really trying anymore, because it felt like it wasn’t going to make any difference, yet I also didn’t feel right asking the teacher to give me more “positive” feedback. I realize now I should have done this, but I’ve spent much of my life being “not quite good enough”, and you fall into this habit that is hard to break.
Yes, academic study is usually about critical feedback and tends to point out the issues with essays rather than telling you what you did right. I’d have to say that about 70% of my essay feedback was this way and I had to develop a thick skin. Even if you realize now that you should have asked for more positive feedback from your tutor, at least now you can see how ‘not feeling good enough’ can lead to you acting in ways that create more ‘not feeling good enough’ situations. It’s very difficult but it is up to us to manage our perceptions of our mistakes and make sure that we put a positive spin on their meaning.
For instance ‘I messed up that paragraph’ could be changed to ‘in the future I’ll know how to write that paragraph properly’ which turns the negative assessment into an optimistic approach to future attempts.
That premise is so right on but should also include the poorly misunderstood terms of “lazy & nothing”.