After a Fall
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about failure, so this week I wanted to talk about what happens afterward. As we’ve discussed, many of us have been taught to see failure as something to avoid at all costs, something that is dangerous, humiliating, and unacceptable; we think that if we fail, that means something about us and whether we’re good enough. Sensing that we have failed in any way may send us into a tailspin of emotions and self-recrimination that puts us off track for weeks, months, or even years. If we can find ways to overwrite some of our destructive programming about “failure,” we can shorten the path to more of what we really want to experience, and keep ourselves from feeling so much pain when it could be much less disruptive.
It’s natural to feel a rush of multiple emotions when life doesn’t go our way. There’s nothing wrong with that, and in fact, each emotion we feel can alert us to a different layer of the experience that it would be helpful for us to consider. Each one carries its own message about how we can keep learning in order to get closer to success. For instance, if anger is a part of your mix, perhaps you’re thinking that external forces are partly to blame, and with some thought, you might be able to learn a few things about how to dance more gracefully with the outside world next time you tangle with it; it also might indicate that you’re blaming yourself for doing something that you now see was a mistake. If you feel sad, it may be because you’re telling yourself that you can’t come back from this, or it was your last chance. Frustration may indicate that you’re starting to need a new strategy or a vacation to rest and renew before you head back out into the world again. No one likes to analyze their own part in a mess, but doing so can be incredibly revealing. Examining what happened and why is essential to future improvements.
Sometimes a balanced, grounded perspective can be hard to come by when you’re confronting feelings around failure, so enlisting the help of others to interpret your experiences can be a huge help. We all have habits of thought as well as blind spots that we’ll never notice if we don’t include outside perspectives. We all have a tendency to overreact in some areas, and only with clarity and practice can we learn to undo our old patterns. Allowing others to help helps us to find clarity, and helps us to build a support system that we can lean on as we work our way toward mastery.
Throughout the whole process of finding your more balanced perspective, Tapping can be such a relief! When you’re in the throes of that first round of emotion that arises when you perceive a failure, it can relatively quickly calm your reactions so that you can give yourself the space to think it all through with less judgment. As each layer of emotion is revealed, it can help you stay calmer as you work out which parts were yours and which were out of your control, and then dial all the emotional intensity down to workable levels. Once you have a better sense of what you think of the whole thing, it can help you to release any regrets you’re holding onto, and any fears about the future that have arisen as a result of your outcome. Once you’ve uncovered beliefs that are impacting your judgments about yourself and others, it can also help you find the origins of those beliefs in your earlier life and address old events that may be a part of your present-day habits and patterns. Depending on how spectacular your crash, finding peace may take a lot of Tapping, but the time you invest in it is worth it. It really can help you become free from the ill effects of painful circumstances that might otherwise keep dragging you down.
In truth, no one is born an expert at anything. While we all have innate talents, we all must build skills in any given area through practice, trial and error. Screwing up is not necessarily failure—most likely it’s just the unglamorous part of the process of gaining skills you need to progress. If you’re still alive, even the worst failures are not final! The more you can learn to calmly assess what has actually happened when you’re unhappy with results, the more quickly you can find clarity about where you went wrong, how to do damage control to salvage what you can from the wreckage, and start to create new and better opportunities for the next time around. And the lessons from experience tend to teach us far more, and stick with us much more effectively, than those we learn second hand, so you might eventually find that you can come to value your mistakes as well as your successes. Wisdom grows as a result of all of our experience, not just the fun ones!