What is failure? One thing I like to be clear about is that people aren’t failures. People fail at tasks, people make mistakes, but they themselves are not failures. Sometimes you just don’t have a particular skill yet. Failure is part and parcel of life. All in all, there’s more failure about than success, it’s just that people don’t tend to advertise it. It would be good if they did. Many people become afraid of failure and then miss out or avoid opportunities. If you do fail or mess up, many times people use this as a way to shatter their self belief. Your idea of failure might be different to someone else’s, so we may suffer acutely from pressure driven by ourselves or others to achieve without hiccups along the way. Fortunately, if you change the way you look at failure, then you can change the way you approach the prospect of messing up, making a mistake or not meeting a personal goal and your feelings of failure can change.
My own point of view is that normalising failure would stop people from comparing their insides to other people’s outsides. Daily, we see images of other people’s success and it appears instagram-effortless. With social media and 24 hour news, we have instant access to a world of others to whom we are invited to compare ourselves, so we will always be able to find someone who appears ‘more successful’ than us. This is highly threatening to our brain, our sense of who we are and where we fit in socially. Our brains’ threat systems have not developed the capacity to keep pace with the modern world and this bottomless pool of others. Our brains may have developed well enough to deal with social comparison in smaller social groups in our evolutionary past as hunter gatherers; this was probably in many ways adaptive and kept us on our toes. Today such large scale social comparison in terms of failure or success is probably unhelpful.
Success is given a good press but many times we don’t get to see the struggle involved behind the scenes. The truth is, success is not always what it seems…
One exceptional quote comes from basketball player Michael Jordan:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games, 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game’s winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
You will notice that Mr Jordan is open about his failures and you could notice that he does not label himself a failure. He only defines his actions. This is important. If he were to rate and label himself as a failure this would impact on his confidence and sense of self worth, and this would make it very hard for him to dust himself down from inevitable and frequent failures. This same attitude can help whether you are just making your way through life, or whether you are learning a new skill at work or for leisure, or trying to make progress in therapy.
To fail at something is part of being a living and growing human being. Think of babies…. if a baby cared too much about failure, they’d never learn to crawl or walk. Think of all the effort, the hard work and the tears required for a baby to get up and moving about. There were many failed attempts before the glorious moment they finally found freedom walking on their own for the first time. Their skill (or success) is the result of many failed attempts with a lot of support and encouragement from caregivers along the way. Failure is part of life and ideally not something to avoid or fear.
In order to experience some success or progress, failure is to expected. Failing is part of learning. No-one is born with talent. Even the most ‘gifted’ person you know did not get up one morning and succeed at what they do… chances are they spend many hours messing up, trying and keeping going. There will have been moments of disappointment, frustration, sadness, joy, all the emotions along the way. The application of effort and ability to tolerate the discomfort of failure is key to picking yourself up again, dusting yourself off and standing tall once more. If you berate yourself as a failure when you fail, your confidence will be shattered. Better to accept that you’re a human being and that while you may fail at things along the way, many of which you have limited to no control over, this has no bearing on your worth as a person.
You are not a failure.
The philosophy behind REBT CBT is that you are much more than the sum total of your actions, thoughts and feelings. You are too complex and unique to be summed up with a mere description or label. Human language in the form of labels is just not enough to capture what it is to be human. We are much more than the sum of our parts. All humans are capable of change, and our skills and attributes are ripe for development if we want to change them. We have changed, we will change and will never from moment to moment be the same, so we can never be captured with a single word. To label yourself a ‘failure’ is an unfounded and inaccurate judgment. It’s easy to label yourself (or another) as a failure, but it’s unfair and overly critical, overlooking all your potential and your past.
As a CBT therapist, I want to help you to adopt a new belief about yourself - that all humans are born of equal worth, albeit sometimes into circumstances and a time that may not have been their choice. The only true things you can say about humans are that each is fallible (prone to making mistakes), imperfect, unique, complex and worthwhile. No person is a total failure, no person is perfect or a complete success, nor is it even possible to describe a person as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
If you want a vivid example of this, I have recently been reflecting on the example of the man who intervened in a terror attack in London and helped to distract and chase the attacker to a location where he was unable to cause further harm. He was claimed a hero. It was later discovered that this same man was on release from prison, having previously committed a murder. So, what is this person? Is he a hero? Or is he totally evil, capable of the worst crime? If we look at it truthfully, he is neither a hero nor is he evil. He’s just a human being, who has on the one hand carried out a heroic act, but he has also committed what most people would consider a terrible crime. When you look at it this way, he’s neither good or bad, though his actions have the potential to be good or bad.
The helpful philosophy of refusing to rate yourself but stay focused on your actions will free you up to do what matters to you. No amount of self-berating when you don’t achieve your goals will help you unless you want to damage your confidence and increase your anxiety. Accept yourself as a fallible human being.
If we can begin to adopt a more balanced and genuinely realistic attitude towards ourselves, then we can accept ourselves for our failings and our mistakes along the way, without shattering any hard-won confidence. We can honestly and fairly rate our actions and accept or improve our skills. But no need to berate ourselves for failures, gentle encouragement and self acceptance will work wonders.
Feel free to keep failing forwards towards your goals and your successes.
Ali Binns is a CBT therapist based in Bath. She works as an integrative CBT therapist using techniques drawn from cognitive behavioural therapies such as REBT, CT, ACT and Compassion Focused Therapy.
