Over the past 9 years of working with a variety of people from different cultures and contexts around their personal development goals, I’ve come to see that “what’s most personal is most general” (anyone know this quote reference?), and that deep down, we all worry about the same stuff. Actually, I think there are only 2 major fears that underlie all human fears, in every culture:

• Fear of rejection
• Fear of failure

I may come back to some tips on dealing with fear of rejection in a future post (let me know if you’d like me to prioritise that topic), but for now, since we’re all going to be making mistakes and “failing” throughout our lives, let’s look at some ways that you can deal with fear of failure. Something I’ve noticed with the diverse group of clients I’ve coached over the years, and watching other people who are also creating great results in their lives, is that the people we consider to be more successful aren’t necessarily making fewer mistakes or having fewer failures. In fact, many of them have had MORE failures. Yet their failures haven’t prevented them from creating great success. This seems to be because of the way they they respond to failure – they’re good at responding to failure. And the way they respond to failure is ultimately a result of how they think about failure, and you can also get good at making mistakes by thinking about mistakes the way they do.

So here’s how to think if you want to make mistakes well:

Realize that “failure” and “success” are subjective, relative terms that you or other people have invented

Ask yourself, “How would I know I’ve been successful?” and discover the criteria you’ve created for success and failure. For example, you might say, “I’ll know I’ve been successful at starting my business if people buy my stuff…” or “I’ll know I’ve been successful if I earn enough to stay location independent.”

Now look at what you wrote, and ask yourself, “What other information would I be leaving out if I only paid attention to these criteria?” From my experience, most people focus on only measurable, tangible results as a way of measuring success – basically the numbers. And while there’s a place for this, I think it’s leaving out a lot of information, particularly the information that’s less tangible and easy to measure. For example, a lot of companies measure performance by looking at quantitative results like sales figures, profit, number of tasks completed and so on, and it’s less common for them to track qualitative performance like teamwork, coaching skills as a manager, quality of relationships with colleagues, attitude, confidence, and so on. Successful people know that, in order to get changes in the tangible results, changes are required in the intangible arenas, and so they include the intangible information in their success criteria.

Here are some success criteria that I encourage people to add to their list, in order to change the way they frame the whole idea of success and failure, so they can become better at responding to failure:

• “I’ll know I’m successful if I’m having fun.”
• “I’ll know I’m successful if I’m learning.”
• “I’ll know I’m successful if I’ve given my best.”
• “I’ll know I’m successful if I’ve had many goes.”
• “I’ll know I’m successful if I’m doing what’s important to me.”
• “I’ll know I’m successful if I’m improving – even if it’s very slowly.”
• “I’ll know I’m successful if I’m improving or adding quality to other people’s lives.”

Sometimes, in the early stages of a project or venture (such as starting your own business), there’s a big lag between the time that you start and the point where you start seeing tangible, measurable results that let you know you’re successful. It’s especially important during that stage that you’re able to pay attention to the intangible results so that you can stay motivated while you wait for the tangible results to develop.

Realize that you can decide the meaning of your results

Our minds are designed to tell stories in order to interpret and make meaning of the information in our environment. However real it feels, the story we tell ourselves isn’t always “the truth” and there are often many different possible interpretations that could be made about the information. For example, the information might be:
“Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling.”

We’d all naturally start telling ourselves a story about what this means. Notice how many different stories you could tell yourself:

• “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling. This means my business isn’t working and I’m a failure.”
• “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling. This means something I’m doing isn’t working.”
• “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling. This means I haven’t let enough people know.”
• “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling. This means I’m not communicating the benefits clearly enough.”
• “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling. This means I need to make some adjustments to the features of the thing I’m selling.”
• “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling. This means I’m ahead of my time and I need to educate people about the relevance of this thing.”
• “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling. This means that I’ve found another strategy I can eliminate and I’m narrowing things down and getting closer to finding out what will work!

The different meanings that the information “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling” are endless.

Choose to believe that your results have a neutral or positive meaning

Notice the difference in how you feel when you read the following stories:

• “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling. This means my business isn’t working and I’m a failure.”
• “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling. This means I’m not communicating the benefits clearly.”
• “Nobody has bought the thing I just started selling. This means that I’ve found another strategy I can eliminate and I’m narrowing things down and getting closer to finding out what will work!

The first story will probably make you feel really negative – tired, sad, angry, and depressed, and it’s likely to trigger the stress response, which changes the way you think and causes you to think in a much more narrow, less creative way. This is exactly the mindset that’ll cause even more stuckness, mistakes and failure.

If you want to respond well to mistakes and failure and use them to improve, innovate and create more success, then you need to preserve the quality of your thinking, because that’s your greatest resource. Can you feel how the second and third story let you feel much better, perhaps even a bit positive because you can already start to see options for the way forward? This is the resourceful mental state that’ll give you the creativity and clarity to generate solutions to the problems and obstacles that had been in your way.

None of these stories could be proved to be true – they’re all subjective interpretations of reality. The only difference is that the first interpretation makes you feel bad and think poorly, while the others let you feel okay and think well. So if you want to be good at responding to mistakes and failures, realize that you can choose your stories and then choose stories that’ll help you feel good, think well and generate creative solutions.

As always, I’d love to hear about how you think of success and failure and what impact you’ve noticed that having – do comment below!

Photo by acordova

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