How can I get comfortable with failure

Hello.

It feels as if autumn is in a hurry this year, ripening the blackberries on the bushes that the dogs systematically rush between, waiting for me to pick them a succulent fruit, and browning the leaves on the tomatoes and beans in a way that makes me wonder whether they’re really coming to an end or have I just been too slack with the watering which, in this part of England, is the only option in the midst of a hosepipe ban.

Thoughts are inevitably turning to academia, as results of GCSE’s will doubtless soon be released, and I prepare for my daughter’s departure as she heads off to begin her PhD, having spent the past year back home.

I’m delighted for her, of course, but nobody told me that ‘empty nesting 2.0’ was a thing, and I’m not much looking forward to it, especially as the last time I felt reasonably sure she’d eventually come back for a while, whereas this time I suspect she may not.

On the upside though, is the prospect of another graduation ceremony in a few years time, at which I will be able to marvel at the titles of PhD theses that contain words I don’t even understand let alone the whole sentence.

It seemed like an opportune time to talk about failure, as our education system is so obsessed with achievement and seemingly little else.

When we drive ourselves to jump constantly through the next hoop, what happens when we suddenly find that progress is less straightforward than it was in the past?

How do we manage when success proves elusive, and what does it take to either dust ourselves down and try again, or even accept that what we had originally considered to be the point of what we were doing might not have been its purpose after all?

For example, I only have 30 subscribers to this newsletter, so is that failure? Or is it indication that, nobody much is interested in what therapists think about things, that I need to think more carefully about the topics I choose, improve my writing skills, or curse the Substack algorithm? (all may be true, of course).

This week’s question comes from someone who has taken much longer than they’d anticipated to complete their PhD and it’s shaken their self-belief to the point of paralysis.

Even if you haven’t completed a PhD, I imagine you can remember a time when you suddenly realised that your sense of your own ability might have been outrun by reality and the jolt it might have given you.

Question: How can I become more comfortable with failure?

When you are used to being able to achieve what you set out to, you build your belief in your own capabilities which gets stronger and stronger until you feel almost invincible. This can be a pretty wonderful place to stand, for as long as it lasts.

Then, something happens either outside of your control or which pushes you beyond your inevitable limits, and you realise that sometimes you can become hampered not necessarily because of your fundamental capacity but because someone or something has made the route forwards more challenging than it first appeared.

It sounds as if doing your PhD was a pretty excruciating experience, so it's no real surprise that it has made you anxious about pushing yourself in other situations.

There are two things worth thinking about here. The first is your view of ‘failure’.

What does failure mean to you? Do you see it as something wholly negative or just a hold up on the road to a kind of success that you may not have initially envisaged but still represents a win?

If it's more the former, perhaps you could reframe your six-year PhD as an illustration of your own indisputable resilience. It may not have been pleasant, but you learned that you can graft through difficulty as well as rely on your intellect.

Seen in this way, you may not have breezed through in the way that you often have when faced with academic challenge, but you have learned something valuable about yourself, which could be seen as even more beneficial in the long run.

The second question it’s worth asking is what avoiding the possibility of failure means for your life now and in the future. It certainly sounds as if it's not making you happy at the moment.

When we are able to accept the possibility of failure but rely on our tenacity to find a way through anyway, we are more likely to push out of our comfort zone into areas that stretch us. Despite the fear of failing this makes us happier (you already know this).

Take a piece of paper and draw a smallish circle in the middle of it. This represents your ‘comfort zone’ and within it lies everything you can already do. Time spent here alone soon becomes dull and uninspiring.

Draw a bigger circle around the first. This represents your ‘stretch’ zone. In here are all the things that require tenacity, effort, and provide opportunities for personal growth. These are the experiences that make life worth living. Time spent here is how you know you’re alive.

There’s a third circle though, outside the two you already have, and it represents ‘panic’. In here are all the objectives and goals that fill you with anxiety because you have no idea how to address them, let alone achieve them. The task here is to separate them into those that are important to you and those that you can discard, perhaps because they are what you feel you ‘should’ do rather than ‘want’ to do, or because they are really someone else’s hopes that you have, for some reason, embodied.

When you bring something from ‘panic’ into ‘stretch’ you make an agreement with yourself that it might be hard to achieve and that you might even end up deciding it’s not what you want anyway. Seen in this context, failure is a signpost, a punctuation that allows you to reflect, reassess, and decide how you want to proceed.

How do we know we are really growing and making the most of ourselves? Through failure.

In your question, you make the observation that perhaps you want to avoid feeling like you did in the past and that’s what makes you put things off or ignore them, so that they can’t ‘beat you’.

You’re right, but they are beating you, because they are forcing your life into a shape that you would rather it wasn’t.

A lot of people think that procrastination occurs when we want to avoid a task but that's not right. We procrastinate when we want to avoid a feeling. Your desire to avoid feeling ‘hopeless’, and whatever other emotions you experienced during the period of your PhD, is stopping you from making the most of your abilities and living life to the full.

Your work is to investigate why that feeling is so intolerable, what it might be saying to you about you, and how you can become more comfortable with discomfort.

What’s your earliest memory of a similar feeling, and what had happened to cause it? Perhaps you are replaying a story from earlier life that has little relevance to where you are now.

Your challenge is not to avoid failure, because that is impossible in the context of a fulfilling existence, but to see failure and its purpose differently.

Instead of an emotion to be feared, you might think of failure the way that Edison did when he was trying to invent the light bulb.

His friends might have said to him something like, ‘Give it up, Thomas, you've failed 1000 times.’

Edison might have replied, ‘I haven't failed, I've just discovered 1000 ways it doesn't work.’

When you can rely on your resilience as a way of enduring setbacks until you inevitably reach the destination you have in mind, you will no longer fear failure.

How do you feel about failure?

How has failure been a signpost that’s helped you towards success, either in the form of some kind of achievement or a greater level of self-awareness? Let me know in the comments.

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