Black Belt in Failure

by Pamelagrace Beatty

Someone once told me, “Failure is simply information.”  What they were saying is we can see our failures as a way of learning how to be more successful in the future…if we choose to do so.

That last part, “Choose to do so,” is “the rub,” as Shakespeare said in “Hamlet.” Learning from the experience is the most challenging part.  It’s easy when we don’t like the way something turns out to say, “I’m never going to do that again,” but not so easy to really take a look at all the parts of the situation, and actually understand where we – that’s right we personally went wrong.  It is, however, so freeing to be brave enough and strong enough to take responsibility for our part in what went wrong.  It also opens the way for our doing better the next time.

Queen for a Day

Queen for a Day was a television program in the 50s. It featured a sort of contest where the contestants each told a story about their current lives. The audience voted on whomever had the saddest story.  The winner would be crowned and have a queenly robe put over her shoulders.  She would receive lots of gifts, like washing machines and nights out and home appliances, maybe even a car.  The show was very popular.  Who wouldn’t want to be queen for a day and have all their dreams come true?  The show helped change the women’s lives.  The viewing audience loved being a part of that.  But did the change last?  Did getting lots of prizes and gifts for being poor or down-and-out make a permanent difference in their lives? Perhaps it gave them a start that changed their perspective, and they went on to live more improved lives. Or maybe it was like some of the people who win the lottery and end up even worse off than before; spending their money too quickly and ending up deeper in debt.  Who knows? What is true however, is if there isn’t a change of thinking then the thinking that supported the poverty will continue and the person will be back in the same situation.

Change your thinking, change your life

Many philosophers and self-awareness gurus have said this.  If we change how we look at things, we change our experience of them.  Again, we are back to “the rub.”  It’s hard to change our thinking at times.  We can get very attached to the way we think, and we don’t want to give up our point of view.  Take a look at today’s news if you want examples.

We cling to our perceptions for many reasons.  Sometimes because we don’t realize they are antiquated.  Things may be different now from when we formed that opinion or belief. Maybe we formed it when we were children and powerless.  Then when we are adults, we are like the baby elephant who, when tied by a rope to a stake in the ground, grows up to be an 8,000-pound adult elephant who still thinks it is bound by that rope on the little stake in the ground.  It doesn’t know it could pull out the rope with one flick of its heel. We don’t know things have changed.  Or maybe we are working from old beliefs taught to us by our parents, communities or schools and we haven’t paid attention to new information that would change that belief.  One of those old beliefs is frequently how we look at failure, how we define failure.  This is where a change of thinking could be helpful.

Just information

If you are anything like I am, you hate failing! I hate making a mistake. I really do. Making mistakes means I’ve failed.  But what if I saw making mistakes as feedback and instead of falling on the sword of “Woe is me, I messed up!”  What if I said to myself, “Oops, gotta do better next time.”  At the very least, that would allow me to sleep better at night and at best, I could take a closer look at the anatomy of the “failure” and learn from my mistake.  That way I would have tools to do better next time.  The tools would come from an analysis of the mistake.  What I did to perhaps cause the mistake, what circumstances surrounded the mistake, and how I my thinking may have contributed to the mistake.   OK, that’s a lot…so here is an example:

A while back, I worked for a company as a contract recruiter. After reviewing

resumes and interviewing applicants, I set up further interviews for the most

qualified with the hiring managers.  These managers were very busy, but most of them

made time for their interviews because they needed to get new employees in

a hurry.  They were very short-handed.  One manager, however, “no-showed”

on her interviewees several times.  I’ve had this happen occasionally, but for a

manager to frequently blow off the interview was just not acceptable.  We lost

good candidates as a result, and at the very least, not only wasted the time of those  

persons being interviewed,  but my time as well.

Soooo, here is where I made my mistake.  I told the manager that blowing off interviews was not a good thing.  Then I went even further and told her that how she was treating the interviews probably showed up elsewhere in her work.  She became very upset, went up the corporate ladder with a complaint about what I said, and it came down through the VP of HR to me.  He got into a lot of trouble as a result of my actions. I felt very badly for him.  But not for the manager I spoke to. I discovered that for some reason I never understood, everyone was afraid of her, even her new director who had promised us she would get this manager under control when she was first hired.  But it became apparent that even the new director couldn’t change that manager’s behavior. 

I realized I had made a mistake by saying what I said to the manager. I also realized that she was a bully and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, and nothing anyone else was going to do.  I regretted putting the VP of HR in the difficult position of having to defend me. Going forward, my solution was to learn more about internal politics before I give someone hard feedback.  My other solution was to recognize what I could change and what I couldn’t.  Fortunately, I didn’t get fired, and fortunately, I never had to work with that manager again.  Someone else was put in charge of hiring her people and I worked with them.

But I was right!

Despite the fact that I felt I was right, I had to let that go and acknowledge the impact my mistake had on the organization.  Was being right worth getting the VP in trouble?  Not in this case. Did my feedback to the manager change her behavior? Nope. Was there another way I could have resolved the problem?  Probably. These are all questions I now ask myself in difficult situations such as this. It is helpful to look beyond our little corners of the world and include a larger perspective…don’t cha think?