On Failure
But the word ‘failure’ reminds me of a pyre – to put it bluntly, an unpleasant image. A look at the word’s etymology suggests I’m not entirely wrong: ‘failure’ comes from ‘to be wrecked’, meaning to break into pieces, and this refers to shipwrecked, shattered vessels.
Let’s be honest: how often do we do something that matches this meaning, this powerful image? A ship that has crashed, with only fragments left, everything lost.
Coaching is rarely about seafaring (which, as a sailor’s daughter, I occasionally regret). It’s about people for whom, let’s say, things aren’t quite going as they’d imagined in their careers.
My job isn’t what I thought it would be; I can’t cope with it, so I’ve failed. My work demands so much of me that I simply can’t manage it; I’m overwhelmed, I’m getting ill – so have I failed?
“We live in a meritocracy where people are measured by their successes and judged for their failures. In hardly any other country in the world are failures so heavily stigmatised as they are here.”
And that is, above all, incredibly stressful.
How is it that we can’t make a decision without being gripped by a terrible fear that it might be ‘wrong’? How are we supposed to know how something will turn out without having tried it first? What’s so damaging about the concept of failure is that it feels as though it reflects on the whole person. It’s not just that things went badly; it’s that I’ve failed. I didn’t manage it. I took on too much.
Failure is simply too all-encompassing for me. Yes, I do believe that it really exists – that state where you’re back to square one, where nothing seems to be working anymore. But as long as you have the motivation to talk to someone about what should happen in the future, about what you’d like to do differently, you haven’t failed. If you have the strength and support to think about how you want to move forward, everything is still fine.
Life just has the odd hiccup sometimes.
“Sometimes you might have to fall flat on your face first to realise that you’re not doing what you’re good at, or not living the life that suits you.”
And when it’s happened?
remember that a failure doesn’t make a person a total zero, nor does it erase everything you’ve achieved before
be kind to yourself in your language – ‘I made a mistake’ instead of ‘I’ve failed’
do better next time, because – yes:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Thank you, Samuel Beckett
I’m not too keen on the whole ‘Design Thinking’ thing. If something feels, excuse my language, rubbish, it’s very likely that it really isn’t any good. In Design Thinking, you create prototypes that you test straight away. If they don’t work, you tweak them. That’s called iteration – why not apply the same approach to your own career?
