Personally, I’d rather not fail. Life seems all that more attractive if it’s all winning. But failure is simply a part of life; it’s pretty much impossible to avoid unless you are incredibly lucky, or deluded! I don’t want to undersell delusion - ignorance can be bliss - but in the long run we all fail at something and it is how we deal with that failure that can have a significant impact on our success.
It could be said, if you are not failing then you're most likely not trying anything new, not shifting out of your comfort zone. Because it’s rare that you are just simply brilliant at something the first time you try it.
Sometimes we fail due to our own fault- we make a mistake, error or a poor decision. Other times it’s just bad luck. Regardless of the cause, it can be useful to reflect on how we deal with failure so we can maximise what we learn, limit future mistakes and errors, and move on.
In a recent review of the literature on emotional responses to failure, error or mistake, psychologist Judith Johnson from the University of Leeds and her team*, identified three strong psychological factors that can buffer emotional distress or dysfunction when faced with failure: self-esteem, attributional style and levels of socially prescribed perfectionism.
Thinking about these three factors can help us develop a more resilient and resourceful response to when things go awry.
Self-esteem
Self-esteem is simply your opinion of yourself. If you don’t value yourself then it’s likely that failure will have more of a negative impact on you. So conversely, a key to being resilient is to have a healthy sense of your value as a person.
To improve your self esteem you can focus on your strengths, make sure you celebrate your achievements, not compare yourself to others and build healthy relationships.
For more on self-esteem and some practical tips check out the Health Direct website.
Attributional style
How we think about failure, and how we explain it to ourselves is our attributional style. There are three main aspects to this: Internal v external, stable v temporary, and global v specific.
1. Internal v external.
Internal explanation of failure is where we find ourselves explaining the failure as a result of something internal to ourselves – you are at fault. For instance, a potential new client decides to go with another firm, and you tell yourself that’s because you stuffed up, you are to blame. An external attributional style, conversely may explain the loss of the client as a result of an extremely competitive legal market, the other firm having a pre-existing relationship, or a wider pool of talent to pull from. In other words, reasons that are external to you.
2. Stable v temporary
A stable attributional style considers failure as a permanent state. Because you lose a potential client means you are going to lose more clients – you are always going to lose clients no matter what you do. Whereas a temporary attributional style may describe the event as a one off - it’s temporary in nature, and your next potential client is going to see things differently.
3. Global v specific
The fact you lost a client means that you are hopeless at all business development, maybe even a failure as a lawyer – this is a global attribution of the failure, it takes on a much larger, wider explanation. Whereas a specific explanatory style would see the loss of the client as specific to that client, not all clients, and certainly no indication of your value as a lawyer.
So the aim when faced with failure is for a positive attributional style where you see the failure in light of external factors – not just a result of something internal to yourself, that it is a one off or at least temporary in nature and specific to that particular event or circumstances.
Socially prescribed perfectionism
Socially prescribed perfectionism refers to the tendency for you to believe that others expect perfection from you. This doesn’t really allow you any room to fail – to fail is to be less than perfect! So if you find yourself living up to your perceived expectations of others then it’s likely your ability to deal with failure may be impaired.
The solution? Work towards reducing socially prescribed perfectionism, see failure as a natural part of the learning and growing process.
Bringing it all together
The key when thinking about our responses to failure is awareness. We may not have really low self-esteem, or be plummeting to the depths of an overly negative attributional style, or being completely dictated to by socially prescribed perfectionism, but we may find ourselves flirting with some less than resourceful thoughts about failure.
Being actively aware of how we think about failure and how we explain it to ourselves and others, can help us make sure we respond in the best possible way - where we see failure as an inevitable part of life, learn from it and move on.
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* Johnson, J et al, Resilience to emotional distress in response to failure, error or mistakes: A systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review 52 (2017) 19-24