After a Fall

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

— Winston Churchill

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!

WhatIfWhatIfWhatIf...

“I’m never sure one is exactly ready. You jump in, with both feet, into a very big fish pond.”

— Julie Andrews

I've noticed in my work that people often stop themselves from moving forward because of a conviction that they don't know what they're doing. Now, I'll be the last one to argue that anyone should dive into unknown waters, where dangers might lurk, in a needlessly clueless state. But often, people who are stuck in this way are incredibly smart, educated, and to all external appearances, fully prepared for success in the areas they're holding themselves back from.  When you're observing someone else in this position, it can be hard to understand the delays and avoidance, because these may seem completely illogical, even silly from your perspective.  Unfortunately, for the person experiencing internal gridlock, the conflict can be intense and very frustrating, because the reasons are very often not conscious.  To get right to the heart of things, the true fear at the bottom of immobility may be the projection of any number of outcomes, such as:

• Fear of failure. As in, "What if I fail? I'll be humiliated publicly. I'll prove naysayers right. I'll lose my shirt.  I'll feel bad about myself. Again."
• Fear of success. "People I care about will be jealous. They will have to adjust to the new me, and will be angry because it won't be comfortable. People will think I'm too big for my britches," (to use an old-school turn of phrase!)
• Fear of not being good enough. "If I let people really see me, they'll realize that I'm a fraud."
• Fear of the point of no return. "If I crash and burn, my reputation will be ruined, and no one will ever trust me again. I'll be so crushed that I'll never have the heart to try again. I'll live out my life in bitterness and obscurity."

Heavy stuff, right? But these are the most common worries that keep us from taking appropriate risks so that we can continue to gain experience, learn, and move (if stumbling) ever forward. If you find yourself in this position in some way, here are some ways to think and act to support your progress:

• If you're going to take on a goal that entails risk, it helps to research the tasks that will be required, ask the more experienced people you can find about what you need to know, consult books and the Internet, consider realistic timelines based on your resources, and work on amassing the knowledge and skills you'll need at your fingertips as you go. Then you need to formulate a plan that organizes your vision into consecutive tasks so that you'll have a map to follow throughout the project. These steps need to become a constant, second nature, if you want to make steady progress
• Acknowledge that you don't have to be perfectly ready in order to start taking action, because that would be impossible. It's ok to work out some things on the fly. No matter what they say, or how experienced they are, everyone does
• It's also ok to allow your plans and timelines to be as flexible as necessary as long as they keep you on track within any hard deadlines that legitimately cannot move. There will always be surprises in the execution of any project.  Berating yourself if things change is not helpful.  Adjusting is
• Finally, consciously remember to apply the habits and tools at your disposal that will help you to stay sane as you stretch yourself—proper nutrition, exercise, appropriate amounts of sleep and downtime so that you won't burn out, social time, EFT for your doubts and worries, and anything else you know helps you recharge your drive and enthusiasm

No one who makes a climb toward a goal knows everything. Neither will you. The trick is to accept that, and equip yourself with the support you'll need to get through challenging times. 

Take a moment to ask yourself whether you're convinced that you're not ready in some part of your life in which you've done a lot of preparation, but are not currently taking action toward what you want. If so, ask yourself why. Is it one of the fears mentioned above that worries you? Something else? Often there will be one feeling or conviction that stands out as very sharp and hard to ignore.  If there is, you might want to get help working with that rather than fighting against it.

Once you're clear on what seems to be holding you back, start mapping out a new plan that will address your concerns, even if it's very general to start with. Remember, you're always going to be learning and fleshing out your plan as you go along, because you can't just magically know in advance everything that will happen once you get started and what the best reactions will be. If you don't know what to do next, consult the best advice you have access to and go from there. If you do nothing, you'll go nowhere—pretty much for sure! Why not put on your shoes and take a few steps? You can always change course, but much revelation only comes to you when you're in motion, having experiences and making connections. Wherever you are, you're good enough and prepared enough to just start.