We, humans, have to learn how to do pretty much everything. We learn how to walk, talk, eat, write, the list goes on and on. There are very few things in life that we don’t have to learn how to do. Failure is a normal part of learning and it can be really freaking hard to cope with. What is failure, and why is it so hard to cope with?
Failure is the inability to achieve a desired outcome or goal. It happens when your expectations aren’t met and your effort doesn’t result in success. Failure provides you with a lot of different information and feedback, which can be hard to sort through. Key aspects of this failure feedback include:
- Serves as a signal of an incorrect response or answer
- Can trigger a negative emotional response
- Can decrease motivation
- Can decrease self-esteem
Failure isn’t just a notification of being wrong, it is a type of feedback that can be invalidating and get in the way of learning new behaviors. Many people associate failure with personal inadequacy, causing them to feel frustrated or embarrassed. Unfortunately, we don’t really learn as well from failure as one would hope.
The probability of failing when you are trying to learn a new behavior is really high. When we fail at something, it can decrease motivation to continue trying the new behavior. Motivation is a really finicky concept because it can be lost and gained at the drop of a hat. This is because motivation is usually associated with positive emotions, like hope and excitement. If you don’t like to do something, you’re not going to be very motivated to do it; this applies to failure as well.
Failure is shown to undermine a person’s commitment to achieving the new behavior. This can happen because people take the failure personally or see it as a lack of commitment instead of a lack of skill. Failure can sometimes reduce self-esteem, whereas success would increase self-esteem.
There’s a lot of pressure to succeed in everything you do. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible. It makes sense that we can’t be good at everything that we do, and it also makes sense that we want to achieve in most things that we do. With this pressure to succeed, when you do fail, it can amplify the negative emotions and make it feel like a personal fault instead of a natural part of learning. Change can also be scary and hard to tolerate, which can make failing at a new behavior even harder to tolerate. Failure makes you face uncertainty and setbacks, which can also be mentally exhausting.
Failure can be really helpful in learning, but only if you are able to separate the feeling of failure from the feedback it is providing. When people fail, they often feel shame, guilt, or sadness. The bigger the failure, the harder it is to tune out the negative emotions you feel when you experience failure from the feedback. If you can’t tolerate the emotions associated with failure, then it is going to be very hard to tolerate failure as a whole. So, to learn to be more okay with failure, learning to tolerate the negative emotions through practicing failing is one way to be more okay with failure.
If you want more help with skills like this, join our skills training groups or schedule with a therapist at CCDBT. We’d love to go more in-depth with this skill and many more like it!
About the Author
Robyn Williams (she/her), M.A., LPC is a Licensed Professional Counselor who specializes in dialectical behavior therapy. Robyn works with teens and adults in a compassionate judgment-free manner to meet clients where they are in life. Robyn helps her clients develop the tools they need in order to live their life worth living, and find what means most to them. Robyn believes that while therapy can be intimidating at times, it can be a conduit for personal growth. Click here to learn more about Robyn’s experience and therapeutic approach.