The Benefits Of Failure

Photo credits: Hicham Boumediane | @hicham_boumediane

Those of you who know me will know that my youngest daughter is a fairly high level athlete. As her mother I have witnessed closely her journey from the start to where she is now. She is hoping to make it to the Olympics. She might… and then again she might not.

I observe on a regular basis the benefits she gains from the many perceived failures and disappointments she encounters. She learns something valuable with every single run and competition that fails to meet the desired targets. I witness that her positive approach to setbacks is what has got her so far in her athletics career. There is a lot to be learnt from children and young people.

To be able to support her I read a lot about the subject of success and failure, of winning and losing, and on fear, which depending on how we manage it, can motivate us or paralyse us. I can tell you that fear of failure has played a big part in my life and in the lives of many clients that I have worked with.

I happen to be reading now a book by Dr. Pippa Grange, a renowned psychologist, called Fear Less.

Dr Grange says that there are many myths surrounding our concept of failure and success: the main one being that losing turns you into a loser. She believes that this is wrong.

She goes on to say this about failure:

“Really you shouldn’t see failure as part of you, but just as giving you a puzzle to solve. Yet that’s not the message most of us absorb. We let failure leave behind a smear on our character, rather than simply being an indicator of our performance on a given day. And that makes us reluctant to show imperfection or vulnerability, in case it’s mistaken for weakness. The truth? Losing is for winners. “

And I say that failures are the path to success. 

I agree with Dr Grange that it is not how we fail or lose that matters but our attitude towards it. 

How do you handle failure? 

My grandmother taught me early on how best to manage my failures. When I came home to her crying and disappointed at failing an exam, she would lovingly comfort me and then ask me a very important question: where do you think you went wrong Rawia? What can you learn from this experience that you can take with you to the next one?

Your willingness to examine closely the failure, see where you went wrong, where you can improve, reassess, re-think and then move forward with this added information is key. If we do this then failing becomes a valuable lesson because it allows us to learn and simply provides us with information about the areas where we need more growth and development. Failing might feel uncomfortable but by perceiving it differently we can reap the benefits.

Dr Grange goes on to say that the best attitude to failure is the one that willingly invites it. 

So how do you willingly invite failure in your personal and professional life?

How about by daring to step out of your comfort zone and do the things you so much desire to do but some old fear or limiting belief has been holding you back. I still remember how terrified I was the day I walked into the chamber of commerce in 2012 to register my coaching practice.

What if I fail? What if I am not good enough?  I felt the fear and did it anyway.

I confess that I have made mistakes and have failed many times on my journey. I am human after all. However through it all I have learnt to face my fears, fully identify them, name them and check which ones are truly mine, and which ones I have inherited from parents and carers and the environment. This has allowed me to do some growing up, and let go of limiting beliefs and decisions around those fears. The result is that I fear less as Dr Grange entitles her book. My failures have been extremely beneficial.

Fear of failure can explain a plethora of human behaviours. It can explain why many avoid public speaking roles and why members of an organisation hesitate to engage in a new scheme or procedure. As a team manager and a coach my experiential understanding of this fear helped me to be more supportive of members in my team and my clients who happen to have a similar experience. I was better equipped to guide them to a place where they felt encouraged to take a chance.

I encourage you to explore your fears and beliefs around failure on your own or with the support of a coach or counsellor. Dare to step out of your comfort zone and do the things that you find most challenging in your personal life or your business.  And let go of the idea of being perfect. Perfectionism is boring. Instead look forward to making mistakes and failing because that is where the most growth and learning occurs. At some point you will succeed. Ultimately in life we win some and lose some. I certainly have not reached the end of the road yet. However I am enjoying every minute of the journey.

My journey to becoming a coach and a counsellor has given me so much more than I had anticipated. It has allowed me to experience the joy of finding myself, expanded my human experience, broadened my frame of reference, and increased my compassion and connection to others. It allowed me to transform pain into power, and poison into medicine as someone in my network once told me. I am very excited about sharing all of this knowledge and experience with others through my work.

As the saying goes “ it’s better to try and fail than fail to try”. Life is so much richer that way. My daughter’s attitude to setbacks constantly reminds me that we live and we learn.  She is always a winner in my eyes whether she makes it to the Olympics or not.

Exam Fever

If you happen to have a son or daughter sitting their last year of school, you will know that at the moment IB students are almost done with their exams and A level students will soon be on their study leave. Yes. Exam fever is here.

Does your son or daughter suffer from exam fever?
Do they get stressed, nervous and even have panic attacks, as the exam date gets nearer? 

It is quite some time ago that I sat my A level exams. However, I still vividly remember my experience. I found it difficult to fall asleep the night before the exam. I tossed and turned and tried to banish, in vain, all the negative scenarios that had crept into my head. On the morning of the exam I was a bundle of nerves and could not eat a thing. In order to keep my energy levels up I used to suck a dextrose tablet every now and then. I used to look with envy at the other students who seemed calm. I could not understand how they could stay so calm and chat away to each other like any other day while I was almost falling to pieces.  I used to ask myself “How do they do that?”

I found the answer to my question 16 years later when I discovered NLP.

Representational Systems and Submodalities

 We take in the world through our five senses and, using the information we gather, we make internal representations of the world. In NLP these are called “Representational Systems” and the five senses are called ‘Modalities” and they are:

V = Visual (sense of sight)
A = Auditory (sense of hearing)
K = Kinaesthetic (sense of touch and feeling)
O = Olfactory (sense of smell)
G = Gustatory (sense of taste)

From an NLP perspective, we concentrate on the first three senses, as the olfactory and gustatory sense, tend to be included under the Kinaesthetic System.

Let’s examine each sensory modality in a little more detail. Visually for example, the pictures you see can have a specific location, be bright or dim in colour or black and white, moving or still, big or small and so on. Similarly the sounds you hear can vary in tonality, volume or speed and the source can be internal, as in hearing your own internal dialogue, or external, as the voice of someone other than yourself. The same applies to your feelings, which again can vary in intensity, location (where in your body you feel it) and size. These finer distinctions are not a coincidence and they are referred to in NLP as “Submodalities”.

These submodalities are unique to each individual and they are the way we code our experiences. When you change the submodalities of an experience, you change how you feel about it.

The following is an example of exam fever and an NLP approach to curbing it:

Due to the type of course my daughter was interested in studying, some of the universities she applied to require that she sit a special scientific exam, BMAT, before her application could be considered. This exam did not so much depend on knowledge as much as on aptitude and skills. The only way she could prepare for it was to do as many example papers as possible. It was also a very high standard test and the score scale was designed so that academically outstanding applicants would score around 5 out of 10. Getting an average grade was something my daughter was not used to. She prepares well, works hard and aims high. Therefore when she consistently wasn’t getting a 9 or 10 she decided that she was not capable and, therefore, a failure. As the exam date got nearer she was getting more and more frustrated, agitated and in an almost near panic state. I decided that it was time to intervene and see what  internal representations my daughter was making about this exam that was getting her into such a negative state.

“What comes to your mind when I say BMAT?” I asked her one afternoon.

“I get a picture in my head.” She answered.

“What kind of picture?” I asked

“Well, I am in the school hall where we normally sit our exams.” She said.

“Where do you see this picture?” I asked again.

“It is right in front of me.” She answered.

“Right. Do you see yourself in the picture or are you looking through your own eyes?” I said

“I see myself in the picture.” She said.

Knowing from previous exercises that my daughter’s positive feelings are usually associated with pictures in which she is looking through her own eyes, I asked her the following.

“ Can you change your picture so you are able to look through your own eyes?”

“Yes I can,” she said.  Then quite unexpectedly she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh mum I am looking at the paper but I can’t see the questions, that is why I am in a panic”

“Ok. I want you to make some changes in the picture so you are able now to see the questions. Can you do that?” I asked

“Yes, yes I can.” She said after a short pause.

“Mum, I am fine,” she then said. “Now that I am able to see the questions I feel so much better. I can do this” and walked off to practice a few more papers.

On the day of the exam she was reasonably calm and went ahead and did her best in the BMAT exam. All it took was slight key adjustments in the submodalities that she was associating with her future experience of this exam.

So next time your child is in a panic state about an upcoming exam, bring to their awareness the internal representations that they are making in their mind in relation to this exam. Make some changes in the submodalities and see which key adjustments create the positive emotion that they desire.

In addition to the above, creating a resourceful anchor like I mentioned in my previous blog can also help put them in a more positive and motivated state. Sometimes simply reminding them of a past achievement or success story can do the trick. It brings to their awareness that they already have the resources they need to succeed.

Recommended reading: De-stress for Exams by Summersdale Publishers