What Do I Mean by Failure?

We’ve talked about self-limiting behaviors and how they hold us back. Underlying those self-defeating behaviors is our fear of failure: the ultimate predator that causes us to limit ourselves. There are enough people out there who want to limit us. We do not need to limit ourselves.  

When I use the word failure throughout this guided journal, I’m using it as a broad umbrella term. If failure sounds too harsh, think of it as a mistake, or misstep, or roadblock—something that didn’t turn out as you had planned.

I like to think of failure as a continuum. On the right side are big failures. I lost my job. I lost my marriage. I lost my bank account. I lost my house. These are BIG failures that hopefully you will rarely experience throughout the course of your life. However, I’m old enough to have experienced a few. And I can state from first-hand experience, the same resilience strategies that help me recover from small mistakes also helped me deal with larger losses.

At the other side of the continuum, are small failures. Here are some of my personal examples. I slept through my alarm and missed a meeting. I shouldn’t have said something in a meeting (happens all the time). Darn. Or, equally as frustrating, I wish I would have said something in a meeting. Drat. I should have put him in his place and I missed my chance. I was going to run 5 miles today, but only ran 2. Or my personal favorite—I was going to eat only two Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies and instead, I ate the entire roll. (Seriously. How can you stop eating Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies once you’ve opened the roll???) This—the small failures, mistakes, shortcomings, mishaps, or speedbumps—is where we practice building resilience, learning confidence, and getting past our fear of failure.

Like anything, you don’t practice interview questions during an interview for your dream job; you practice with friends and in less important job interviews. That way, when your dream opportunity arises, you’ve practiced and you’re prepared. We’ll do the same here. We’re going to practice building resilience by reframing smaller failures—didn’t get the job, said something stupid, messed up an order while waitressing, or got a B+ instead of an A. You don’t practice your free throws when the state championship is on the line. You practice free throws in your driveway so that when the state championship is on the line, you know what to do. While we will practice building resilience with smaller failures, know that these same skills can be used to reframe larger failures. I know from experience.

As part of my Women in Sales class, I teach women to become resilient because rejection is inevitable. Without resilience, failure could be the end of an otherwise lucrative and promising career. Thus students are required to write five papers where they practice failing and building resilience. I wanted to call this assignment Failure Papers but that sounded too dark, so I renamed the assignment Resilience Papers. I graded over 2,500 of these Resilience Papers before allowing my teaching assistants to grade them. And guess what I learned about failure? My educated guess is that 95%-98% of the failures listed in these women students’ resilience papers were self-imposed. Occasionally a paper would cite a bad experience with a supervisor or, more common, a lower grade on an assignment than expected. But in the vast majority of cases, the failure came because the student did not meet her own high—dare I say unrealistic—expectations of herself. In the majority of cases, it’s not the world telling us we’ve failed, it’s us telling us we’ve failed. Ouch!

Fear of Failure

But it’s not the failure itself that concerns me. We all eventually learn that a B+ is not the end of the world and, don’t tell anybody, but nobody really cares about your GPA. And yes, you can learn from your mistakes. So it’s not the failure itself—a mistake can be fixed. What I’m concerned about is the fear of failure: not taking action because you’re afraid you might fail, not because you have failed. You avoid taking a risk which is the flip side of an opportunity, because of the fear that you might fail.

Fear is deadly. We can overcome failure—in fact, we learn from our mistakes. But if we are afraid to fail and never take a risk, we deprive ourselves from the learning. Fear masquerades by various names. I like to call it fear, but others call it anxiety, worry, or insecurity. Even Imposter Syndrome is rooted in fear, the fear that someone might find out that I’m not perfect or that I don’t have all the answers. Biblical scholars claim that “fear not” is the most repeated verse in the Bible; clearly we haven’t gotten the message yet.

Resilience Is the Antidote to Fear of Failure

Before we go any further, I want to make it clear what we’re talking about. The term resilience gets a lot of press these days. As a former English major taught to value the accuracy of word choice, it drives me nuts because in many (most?) cases the word “resilience” is misused and frequently interchanged with persistence, which it is not. I go crazy when someone uses the word resilience when what they really mean is persistence—a related, but different term. For the sake of my sanity and communication clarity, let’s make these definitions clear. For the purposes of this text, I define resilience as the ability to bounce back quickly after failure.

When I think of resilience, I think of that kid’s toy, the blow up, punching bag clown with a weighted base. The point of the toy was that you would punch the clown (in retrospect, that seems a bit violent—but this was way before video games) and the clown would bounce right back in position, as if it had never been hit. That’s resilience. It’s the ability to bounce back quickly after failure. Instead of ruminating, reacting, and refraining, all of which is time consuming, emotionally draining, and self-defeating, resilience enables the individual to move on quickly after a failure.

Successful entrepreneurs have a saying: fail fast. What does that mean? It means that if you are an entrepreneur, you are likely to fail and fail more than once. If you take time to ruminate, react, and refrain, you will never get to work on your next big idea. Entrepreneurs with resilience get over their failure quickly and get on to their next big invention.

Resilience Is Not Persistence

Resilience is distinct from persistence which means to keep going in spite of adversity. For example, when my barre instructor coaxes us into holding a physically challenging plank pose (like a push up without movement) for way too long, she reminds us we are “resilient.” If I wasn’t too exhausted trying to hold the plank, I’d yell “No! No! No!—we are not resilient in holding this pose! The word is persistent! Persistent! Not resilient!” Lucky for her, I’m too exhausted trying to keep up with the class to protest her misuse of language. But it clearly upsets me.

Nothing is wrong with persistence. It is an admirable trait in some circumstances, as eloquently pointed out by Angela Duckworth and her research on grit. But sticking it out, no matter what, is very different from resilience. Persistence would tell you to keep running a marathon even though you have a broken leg, because you need to press on no matter what. Resilience is when you are flat on the ground mired in failure, and you pick yourself up and continue on and try again. Resilience means that you have hit rock bottom and pulled yourself up. Persistence does not allow for the hitting of rock bottom—a.k.a. failure.

To reiterate, persistence has its value but that is not what we are talking about here. And later on you’ll see how, in some cases, to be resilient you have to quit (i.e., not persist and remove yourself from a toxic situation) to succeed. More on that in the section on resilience strategies. But for now, remember that resilience is different from persistence—in spite of the general public might say.

What Is Confidence?

So how does all of this relate to confidence? I define confidence as belief in your abilities. Simple as that. I can do this. I can finish this race. I can speak up in this meeting. I can ask for the sale. I can run for election. I can serve as a leader.

Note what confidence is not. Confidence doesn’t say you have to win, be the best, or be perfect. You may not win the race. Not everyone will like your idea when you speak up in the meeting. You may not get the sale. You may not win the election. Confidence doesn’t comment on the outcome—confidence is the ability to do the task. Period. Do the work. Let go of the outcome.

There is no comparison in confidence. Once again, I’m confident I can perform the task. I’m not saying I can do it better than you or worse than you. I’m saying I can do the task. Keep the blinders on and focus on what you can do—run the race, speak up, take a risk. I’m fond of adding a postscript to the quotation “Comparison robs you of joy.” Comparison also robs you of confidence because there will always be someone worse off than you and, rest assured, there will always be someone better. No comparisons.

How do you learn confidence? You learn confidence from practice. For example, I am confident of my ability to teach college courses. How did I get that confidence? The ability to teach may be one of my gifts but I also diligently practice my craft. I experiment with different teaching techniques and tools in the classroom, and I cultivate the ones that work and eliminate the ones that fail. As a result of over thirty years of teaching college and lots of experience—good and bad, success and failure—I am confident in my ability to teach.

How did my daughter learn to have confidence in her ability to make free throws when she played basketball? Because, being the good Hoosier that I am, I made her practice 100 free throws every day in our driveway (I shagged the balls and counted). I even recruited our border collie to bark and whine as a distraction to simulate an antagonistic crowd. When Joan went to the free throw line, she was confident that the ball would go in the basket. And I was too. Did she make every free throw? Of course not. But she made more than she missed and because she practiced, she walked to the free throw line with confidence. Just call me coach.

And No, It’s Not Self-Confidence; It’s Confidence

While we’re at it, let’s talk about another misused term: self-confidence. I’m not a fan of the term self-confidence. Not saying it’s right or wrong, but the global concept that someone is self-confident does not track with my experience, observation, or research. I conceive of confidence as being contextually bound. What I mean by contextually bound is that you can be confident of your abilities in some areas of your life and less confident of your abilities in other arenas.

My level of confidence in my ability to plan an event—whether that be a workshop for professional women, a wedding, or Thanksgiving dinner—is practically non-existent. Planning an event is my worst nightmare. What if no one comes? What do you serve? How are you going to invite people? What are you going to talk about? And my list of fears goes on and on. As I write this, I am in the event planning process for Women Talking: a gathering of professional women and women students where they share their frustrations and advice when engaging in predominately male professions. My stomach is in knots thinking about the event and I have expressed that fear to everyone and anyone who will listen.

But this I do know. By following the same process I used to develop confidence in my teaching abilities—practice, evaluate, tweak, and practice again—I can learn to have confidence in my ability to plan and host events. The secret sauce is in finding or creating opportunities to practice, which may involve making mistakes with low consequences. In the Women Talking event, for example, this is my second event. I helped plan the initial event, so I have an idea of what to do. This is the first time I’m leading the event. While I eventually plan to expand the event to a larger audience and increase the cost to participants, for the second event, I’m holding the attendance to a number slightly above the initial event and charging a minimal amount ($30.00/person) which is more than the first event which was free, and is less than what I plan on charging in subsequent events when the event is established. Baby steps. I may never quit my day job to become an event planner—I truly don’t think the gift of hospitality is in my bones—but I can become confident in my ability to pull off an event if I need to. Confidence is a learned skill. And if I can learn it, you can too. And once you learn confidence in one area of your life, you can take that same process and adapt it to another area as needed. And PS—the Women Talking event was a huge success.

What Happens When We Fail? The Failure Process

OK. So, some of you might think I’m carrying this fear of failure piece a little too far by mapping out the failure process. But I think it’s important that we identify exactly why we’re so afraid of failing. And the failure process plays an important part in our fears. As the daughter of an engineer, while other dads were taking their kids to Disneyland for vacation, my father was dragging us through factory tours. I’m serious. I’ve seen how Ford automobiles were made, how Kellogg’s corn flakes are processed, how Sap’s donuts are baked, and even how Kodak cameras are produced. And the list goes on. I didn’t always appreciate the factory tours as a youngster. OK, I didn’t like them at all and I couldn’t understand why we didn’t go to Disneyland like the other kids. But as an adult, I’ve come to appreciate the factory tours and my father’s engineering background gave me an appreciation for process design. Little wonder as a doctoral student I studied the consumer behavior decision process and the sales process. Likewise, we need to look at the steps in the failure process.

Failing Hurts

To add insult to injury, besides all the things that people think or say about us if we fail, there are also not-so-good thoughts rattling around our head when we fail that cause additional pain. And let’s be honest. I’m into comfort and will avoid pain any chance I get. So rather than deal with the possibility of failure, I avoid risk and limit myself and I bet you do the same (see the section on self-limiting behaviors). For now, I want you to think about what happens in your head when you fail or make a mistake. I call these steps “the three R’s.” No—not reading, writing, and arithmetic. When we fail, we tend to ruminate, reprove, and refrain and, believe me, that’s no fun. No wonder we avoid the possibility of failure at all costs. And avoiding risk, and the opportunities it presents, costs us a lot.

Ruminate—We Keep Replaying the Mistake in Our Heads

Think about what happens when you fail. If you’re like me and other women, you tend to ruminate about your failure. To be clear, rumination in moderation is not bad. Reflecting upon mistakes holds us accountable and helps prevent similar mistakes in the future. Learning from mistakes is good but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about playing and replaying the mistake over and over and over again in your head. It’s like an ESPN film clip playing in a continuous loop. Some poor kid misses a field goal, costs the team the game, and ruins everyone’s life. And thanks to the marvel of film, that mistake gets played on national TV, Instagram, and Tiktok over, and over, and over again. A similar thing happens when we fail. We play our mistake over and over again in our heads. Why? It makes no sense. Do I think the ending will be different if I keep re-hashing the incident? As we all know, the ending doesn’t change. And in fact, by replaying the incident in our head, we are reinforcing the mistake and encrypting it into our memory. Great. Remember how you memorized your phone number when you were in kindergarten? You repeated it over and over until it was etched in your memory—never to be forgotten. Replaying our failures over and over again in our heads has the same effect. Instead of forgetting the incident and moving on, we stay stuck in our error. No wonder we don’t want to take a chance on failing—who wants to keep reviewing the mistake over and over again in their head?

To make matters worse, research suggests that women ruminate more than men. From personal experience and from listening to the over 1,400 women who have taken my Women in Sales class, I believe it. However, I have to say from my experiences teaching men, I believe they ruminate too. My guess is that men are less likely to admit that they ruminate; hence the discrepancy with the data and my observations.

Reprove—We Beat Ourselves Up

In addition to replaying the failure over and over again in our heads, we also beat ourselves up—or reprove ourselves—for making a mistake. While replaying the failure, I’m mentally trash-talking myself—what a stupid mistake, how could I have made such a stupid mistake, now everyone thinks I am stupid because of my stupid mistake, and the mental beating goes on and on. Why? Why do we think that beating ourselves up and punishing ourselves will stop the behavior? When you mentally beat yourself up, all you get is pain, not improvement. So why do we keep doing it? I suspect we think that by mentally beating ourselves up, we will not engage in the behavior again—like getting spanked as a little kid. But we’re not little kids anymore and a beating—mentally or physically—hurts. I’m not going to risk the chance of failing if getting beat up is a likely outcome.

When mentally beating myself up (don’t forget, I am the queen of failure) I tend to head to dark places and make assumptions about what other people are thinking about me. As we discussed in the people-pleasing section, we don’t really know what people are thinking. We think we do. But, unless you’re a mind reader or God—neither of which is likely—we don’t actually know what other people are thinking. We think they don’t like us, or are laughing at us, or are calling us idiots behind our backs. But the reality is, we don’t actually know that. As I remind my students and myself, I have no idea what others are thinking. I’m not a mind reader, and more than likely, neither are you. So maybe it’s time to stop the mental abuse.

One of the most dangerous misperceptions is that we think everyone is paying attention to us. Thinking that all eyes are on us and that everyone remembers exactly what we said, wore, etc,. is debilitating. Unless you are Taylor Swift—or someone of similar fame—the reality is that people are not likely as focused on you as you think they are. What are people truly focused on? Their favorite topic—themselves.

Why is this so hard? It’s hard because we stop listening about halfway through a sentence so that we can create some brilliant response. I use this exercise in class to demonstrate that people are not paying attention to you—they’re paying attention to themselves and their brilliant responses. Next time you find yourself becoming self-conscious and feel like everyone is looking at you remind yourself that what they are really thinking about is themselves.

Refrain—We Decide We’re Never Doing That Again

To review, when we fail, we ruminate, we beat ourselves up—reprove, then we refrain. We tell ourselves, “I’m never doing that again.” Ouch. The first two reactions to failure are painful, but the last reaction—refraining from ever doing that again—is deadly. If you quit after one failure, you’re stuck. You’ll never go anywhere. A recent Harvard Business Review article reported that women are 40% less likely than men to reapply for a leadership position after being turned down. Whoa! Think about that for a minute. Instead of learning from the initial application and applying again, women tend to stop applying. And the problem with that is that you will never get anywhere if you don’t apply. I would maintain that few of us succeed on our first try, and that success comes after multiple attempts. If you quit after the first try, you’ll never get anywhere.

I could overwhelm you with examples where I have tried once, failed, and refused to try again, but one of the most vivid examples, and the moment I started practicing what I was teaching, came in the form of a teaching award. I pride myself on being a good teacher, so imagine my dismay when I did not get the teaching award for which I had so judiciously applied. To add insult to injury, a person I could not stand, and, in my not-so-humble-opinion was not as good of a teacher as I was, won the award. I was furious and stormed into my department head’s office whining and complaining about how the award winner was underserving and how I had been cheated. To her credit, she patiently listened to my whining (could I please have a little cheese to go with my whine?), then reminded me of my own words. If you don’t apply, you will never get it. She basically told me to shut up, get back to my office, and work on next year’s application. I did. And didn’t win. So I applied a third time. And you are reading the words of an award-winning teacher.

If You’re Not Failing, You’re Not Trying

Why is fear of failure so paralyzing? Because if you are afraid of failing, you will never take a risk, try something new, and get outside your comfort zone. Fear of failure keeps us trapped inside our supposedly comfortable cocoons which are, in reality, suffocating our potential. And stuck we stay. To become butterflies, we have to a take risk and crack out of the cocoon.

The connection between fear of failure and taking a risk—whether it be signing up for a course outside your major, applying for a new position, moving to a new location, or just doing something different—was vividly illustrated by a former student. As part of my sales class, students have to practice failing (more on that later) so that they will be able to move on quickly from rejection in the sales world. When collecting papers, one young man commented that he was unable to do the assignment that week because he had never failed. Seriously?!? I raised an eyebrow and gave him a zero on the assignment. Later, he wrote me an insightful email. He realized the reason he hadn’t failed, and consequently had been unable to complete the assignment, was that he never tried anything new. He keeps within his comfort zone where he is assured of success and thus avoids any possibility of failure. Eureka. And I’m not talking about the vacuum cleaner company. The lightbulb for him, and me, went on and he has since learned how to tiptoe outside his comfort zone to much success. I will always be grateful to him for sharing his insight with me and we have stayed in touch over the years.

R2 = C The Connection between Risk (Fear of Failure), Resilience, and Confidence

The antidote to fear of failure is not making friends with failure (seriously?!?) or welcoming failure (are you kidding me—you might as well welcome Jack the Ripper). Learning from failure is helpful, but beware because taken to the extreme, it can lead to excessive rumination. The key to overcoming fear of failure is practicing resilience. Note that I didn’t say eliminating your fear of failure. The feeling of fear will always be there. I feel it every time I parallel park my car, teach a new class, or wonder if the module I taught last semester will be embraced by the students this semester. The fear of trying something new—taking a risk—will always be there. But if you have learned to practice resilience, the fear is not paralyzing. Prior to delivering my TEDx talk—one of the most terrifying things I have ever done because it is saved for posterity and broadcast over the unlimited internet—a graduate student reminded me that the definition of courage is “feeling the fear and moving forward anyway.” I like that. You will never eliminate the fear that you might fail when you take a risk, but if you are resilient and you know you can bounce back from failure, the fear no longer paralyzes you from trying something new.

Resilience and confidence work together in helping us reclaim our strength, power, and voice and play a crucial role in getting past our fear of failure. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t take a risk—apply for a stretch job, run for office, speak up in a meeting where you’re the only woman—because you might fail. Game over. You may have enough courage to take the risk and speak up, but if you get shut down (more on that in the communication section), and you lack resilience, you’ll be afraid to speak up again. You tried, you failed, and without resilience, you’ll never try again. But if you are resilient, you’re more likely to take a risk—what’s the worst that could happen? And if it doesn’t go exactly perfect the first time—likely because it’s the first time—you’ll try again because you are able to bounce back quickly after failure. And the fact that you’re willing to try again, and again, and even again, puts you on the road to becoming confident because you’ve practiced doing it so many times. Resilience cultivates confidence. Resilience neutralizes our fear of failure and gives us the courage to take a risk.

In fact, in my use of this exercise in multiple settings and classrooms, I’ve never lost a person yet. I will say, when talking with a group of lawyers, a couple of people did, in fact, get $20. I’m not sure how to explain that except that maybe lawyers make more money than the rest of us, but I digress. The point of this exercise is to illustrate resilience. You didn’t get what you wanted yet and you didn’t die. What’s the worst that can happen? They say no. And no one dies. This is the mindset we will learn to adopt when we start practicing resilience strategies. More to come.