Failing forward: How to turn setbacks into success
I’d like to share a little concept with you that I teach my coaching clients that has helped them realize tremendous shifts in their mindset. It’s about the idea of failure.
After exploring the reality of failure over and over again, I realized that this thinking principle applies to almost all areas of life, failure or otherwise, just plug in the debate of the moment and see how well it works.
An extremely common but often denied cognitive distortion that is widely perpetrated by the media is all-or-nothing thinking. This line of thinking divides our minds into two distinct categories: black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. It is an absolutist way of thinking that limits our ability to rationalize alternative possibilities and closes our minds to new learning opportunities. It is wildly popular among politicians to distinguish their voices and separate themselves from their opponents.
Although it seems obvious on paper why this is an extremely problematic way to drive society, it’s also very tactical and intelligent because when pressed with stressful, potentially threatening events, our brains are hard-wired to make sweeping judgments and decisions for the necessity of our survival. Tapping into our emotional brain deactivates the crucial and more highly evolved prefrontal cortex with makes decisions analytically. When pressed on quick issues for survival, however, our brains rely almost exclusively on the emotional, fear-centered brain region to ensure our safety. One of the quickest ways to do this is to split our choices into categorizations of life/death, good/bad, right/wrong, black/white, etc.
The nuances of grey, the areas and realities of ‘in the middle’ simply fail to exist in our consciousness when we are in a high-stress situation. Compile this with the reality that we are also hard-wired for survival to pay more and closer attention to negative information, as threat detection is more important for survival than pleasure, and it’s obvious why most of our social structures and marketing deploy strategies to tap into this all-or-nothing mindset.
How does this relate to failure?
Well let’s face it: failure sucks. It’s uncomfortable, it’s disheartening, and it’s stressful.
Often times when we set goals, we disillusion ourselves with the realities of life. We become rigid with our expectations and our timelines and forget to acknowledge all the very real reasons why our goals are our goals in the first place.
This means that when the excitement of something new wears off and the momentum slows down, the cracks start to spread and one day we open our eyes to the reality of our shortcomings. Now, not only are we off course, but we’ve also done something that our human brains absolutely hate: we have broken integrity with ourselves by not keeping our word and doing what we said that we would do.
This causes a massive rise in our emotional brain center, which as you may have guessed, very often triggers all-or-nothing thinking.
My guess is that you’ve been here before, probably more than once.
“Oh, I just ate a cookie, might as well have pizza for dinner and I’ll start again tomorrow.
Ah, I slept in again; I’ll skip the gym today and I’ll start again tomorrow.
Oops, I just had a drink; I guess I’ll just have a few more and I’ll start again tomorrow.
Darn, I just wasted an hour watching TV instead of cleaning; well I can just do it all tomorrow.”
Whatever it is in your life, we all have instances where we catch ourselves in behaviours that don’t correlate with who we are trying to be, and it doesn’t feel so great. Instead of letting these setbacks determine a defeatist attitude that temporarily relinquishes responsibility, the challenge becomes to stop failure exactly where it is and not let it go any further.
I call this concept failing forward, and to me, it means acknowledging failure as soon as it happens and deciding differently. Once you are aware of your actions, understanding the biological systems that drive your next decision can be extremely helpful as a tool to make the next right choice of integrity.
Once you have awoken to your failure, the stress from failing often presses us to get back in alignment with ourselves as quickly as possible but once we have chosen “bad/wrong/etc”, it becomes less natural to switch sides. Here we are facing an internal conflict of identity and our survival patterns indicate that switching groups, or identities, was riskier for survival than just committing full out to one thing. Understanding this gives us the freedom to see this for what it is: any and all failure is simply but a growth opportunity, and not the life-or-death situation that our subconscious believes it to be. This gives us the power to stop failure in its tracks and switch teams at any time.
The goal of failing forward is to notice failure a little bit earlier on its trajectory every time. This is how meaningful and lasting change sustains itself as you create your new identity; inching once failing forward step at a time, each one slightly less worse than the last. This is the true path to success.
The biggest mental release, of course, comes from realizing that there are no sides, no teams, no division of identities in the first place and that there never was; but maybe that’s a conversation for another time.
