Week 10 – Failure as Feedback: Crafting the Right Response to Setbacks on Your Journey

You know me as a 19-year-old degree apprentice earning a salary and not paying to go to uni. But that isn’t the whole story.

Let me tell you a story of my failures.

  • I failed to get into my first-choice firm.
  • I failed my tabla grade six on the first attempt.
  • I failed to stay consistent in the gym until the past few years.

Failure. It’s a tough word. It often means we can’t.

Let’s change that. As much as these failures hurt me, they also forced me to improve. They allowed me to build to a new level.

Setbacks are opportunities for an even greater comeback.

In this week’s post, I will make the case for failure as the best opportunity to progress.

We see failures as ‘never going to achieve. ‘ If I fail at going to the gym consistently, I will never be a ‘gym-goer’.

We need to rephrase this.

We can’t go to the gym consistently yet. I’ve ‘not yet’ achieved consistency.

Focusing on our failures in the present leads to the ‘Tyranny of Now’. This is a vicious cycle of self-deprecating talk.

But if we phrase it as ‘Not Yet,’ we can still see a light at the end of the tunnel.

We are rewiring our brains and psychology to treat failure as a minor setback, not the end of the journey.

Underpinning this is our willingness to be vulnerable. Brené Brown says that we must have the courage to be imperfect.

Failing is not a weakness; it’s an opportunity to work on our imperfections.

We all have them, so don’t feel like you’re weak. You’re not, you are on your pathway to progress.

So, now that we have adopted the right mindset, we need to be able to use these failures as a tool for valuable feedback.

A study done in the last decade has shown that we need to create an environment to safely fail in. This provides the springboard to comeback.

What does this consist of?

  1. People who invest in your development and care about you.
  2. Understanding what your measurable aim was.
  3. How these two will convert into a new goal.

This means that when you eventually fail, it is easy to gain some feedback on this.

For me, I aimed to go to the gym four times a week.

The failure to do this led to my brother highlighting to me that my aim may have been too ambitious.

Unfortunately, while feedback is great, some people are horrible at giving it. Also, sometimes we hear a lot more constructive feedback rather than positive.

So, to move forward from failures in our pathways, we need to maintain resilience.

Lucy Horne found three traits that resilient people often display. This is to ensure they don’t get encapsulated by their failure:

  1. Resilient people get that shit happens. Sometimes we fail, and this is okay; it’s a part of life. We accept that we will go through struggles. That’s what makes the good times worth it.
  2. Resilient people are good at choosing where they focus their attention. They give their energy to things that they know they can change.
  3. Resilient people always ask themselves: Is what I’m doing helping me? Is my response aiding my comeback? If the answer is no, they stop it immediately.

Thus, if we can maintain resilience, we are bound to keep going after the moment of failure.

In our story, there is a point where we may crash. Yes our mind is trained well, and we can appreciate the constructive feedback.

Nonetheless, a question might pop in: Should I carry on with this journey?

When I was struggling with gym consistency, I asked myself, Is it time to give up?

To deal with this, Elizabeth Gilbert asks us one question: Do I love this more than I love myself? Is this my home?

By this, she means, can we come back to the journey after the failure and still enjoy the actions.

If the answer is yes, we know this is the pathway for us. If not, we need to change. Be flexible.

Even though my consistency wasn’t there, I loved being in the gym and working out. So, I knew I had to keep going.

Hence, we have now got a step-by-step plan for our comeback from failure:

  1. Treat it as having not mastered the skill YET.
  2. Create your environment to fail safely.
  3. Try to extract valuable feedback from it.
  4. Ask yourself, is the path worth continuing.

Remember, setbacks are opportunities for an even greater comeback.

Here is my weekly challenge:

  1. Look at one failure you’ve experienced recently.
  2. Do some detailed personal analysis of how you responded to it using the structure above.
  3. Can you learn something from it?

Have a great weekend

Dylan 🙂