Handling Failure

From Pioneer Junior College in Singapore, this goes a bit more indepth into ways to untwist your thinking.

First let me talk about the doughnut. When given a doughnut, what do you see? A pessimist would see the hole, but the optimist, the dough, and the sugar, of course. But the realist sees both. See, life is not about solving a problem; it’s about experiencing realities. And our realities are often made of the positive and negative. Like the song goes, "There is good and bad in everyone." So life cannot be all smooth-sailing; that’s too unreal. It can’t be all horrible too; that’s too tragic.

What we do to ourselves
First of all, we need to recognise some distorted, crooked or twisted thinking we may have. We see things as all or nothing , black or white, which means "I'm either a success or a failure." But in reality, we are successful in some things, and are not-so-good in others. Hence, we can’t be all success or all failure. We may not be good in Math, but we’re fine with English. We may not be good friends with a certain group of people, but we are with another group. Or we may not even be academically inclined, but we may be good in sports, music or art. So, back to the doughnut, the realist sees both the hole and the dough in the doughnut. There are some things we are good at which we need to affirm, and other things which we need to be aware to make improvements in.

Very often, we also tend to harp on the negatives, which means we major on the negatives. We seem to like to dwell on the negative and to disqualify the positive. It is as if our success doesn’t count, and our efforts don’t matter. Instead of acknowledging that I have passed some tests, I just dwell on the one I’ve failed in, and moan and groan about the failure. How about the ones I’ve passed? Instead of the many friendships I’m enjoying, why am I focussing on the one I had just broken off with.

As a consequence of that, we may tend to overgeneralise. So, because I failed once, I think that I’ll always fail. Worse still, we may also label ourselves as failures. But I would like to let you know that you have just failed one test, and that does not make you a failure. Tell yourself that, ‘I’ve failed a test, but that does not make me a failure.’ By the same token, you may have lost a game in soccer, and you call yourself or others call you a loser. Remove that negative label and tell yourself instead, ‘I’ve lost a game, but I’m not a loser!’

We are too quick also to blame ourselves for failures, and more than that, we are also too quick to jump to the conclusion that when things go wrong, we are responsible for it. We also seem to have an inclination to magnify others’ success, but when it comes to ourselves, we have a tendency to magnify our failures and minimise our successes.

The words in bold above are examples of distorted or twisted thinking we get trapped in, and because of such thinking, we constantly think and feel we are failures, hopeless and useless. The following ideas help us to deal with such thinking that leads us to think and feel that we are failures.

What we need to do
The first thing is to recognise if we are caught up with such twisted thinking, and how such thinking has affected the way we think and feel about ourselves – as failures. And we need to get rid of these distorted thinking, and these are some ways we could go about doing it:

* What would you say to a friend? As we are generally harder on ourselves than others, think about what you would say to a friend who has failed. Then say those things to yourself.

*Examine the evidence. You say you’ve always been failing, but things were alright in your primary school before you went to secondary school. In secondary school, you had several transitions, settling in a new school, being in a single-parent family, experiencing adolescence.

* Experiment. You say you’re stupid, but are you really? Test yourself on a task that you can handle, like fixing the radio.

* Look for partial successes. You say that you have been a failure all your life, look for exceptions. ‘Was there a time when you were successful? How was it like for you?’ Instead of saying "My Dad hates me," ask yourself, "Was there a time when he showered his love on me?"

* Take a survey. You may like to get feedback from significant people in your life – trusted family members and friends, and get some affirmations from them about how they see you. You can be sure they will be able to affirm positives in you.

* Define your terms. Like it was mentioned earlier on, failing a test doesn’t make you a failure. You need to constantly tell yourself that, and begin to reframe by saying something akin to, "I'm not failing; I need to begin to work harder towards success."

* Solve the problem. Begin to take active steps to identify the types of thinking. Stop tearing yourself down and begin to affirm yourself.

There are some things I can't change which I need to accept. But there are other things which I can change, and which I must take steps towards change. One of the latter is my perception of failure, and I can begin by changing my perception of this by looking for opportunities for growth instead of burying myself in sorrow and defeat.