By Harvey Deutschendorf
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” —Thomas Edison
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take…Hockey Superstar Wayne Gretzky
At the time that he struggling to invent the light bulb Edison was derided and ridiculed by the media as a great failure. The quote above was Edison’s response to a reporter asking him why he persisted and didn’t give up. Like many successful people whose work impacted the world before and after him, Edison had been able to reframe failure to his advantage. Rather than see it as a disadvantage, or obstacle, he was able to see the value in it. We will be hard pressed to find anyone who has made major contributions to our world, who got it right the first time. Instead, we will find a trail of setbacks, missteps, dead ends, and detours that finally lead them to the achievements that are so visible.
The first step in reframing failure is to look for the opportunity within it. What does it tell us about our work, ourselves, and those we are working with. If we are looking for opportunities to continuously learn we will discover aspects of what doesn’t work in all our failures that will, as they did with Edison, lead us closer to what will ultimately work. Instead of looking at it strictly as a failure, consider thinking of it as an experiment that gave us valuable information which we can draw upon to move forward. As well as an experiment, we can view failure as a transition time or period that we are required to go through. “Thinking of failure as part of the process normalizes the experience and makes it an expectation, rather than an exception,” says Dr. Melanie McNally, a psychologist and author of The Emotionally Intelligent Teen. It can also be looked at as a time to build new skills and make connections with like minded colleagues and leaders at your workplace.
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new” — Albert Einstein
Having tried and failed means we had the courage to try something new. Since there are few, if any, new endeavours that have guarantees of success, we are stepping out of our comfort zones, building our resilience. “We get more and more resilient each time we try something new, regardless of whether it works out. We’re expanding our capacity to tolerate discomfort, which causes our comfort zone to get bigger,” says Dr. McNally. If we need motivation to keep going after a setback, we simply must think of all the well-known people and the setbacks that they endured before finally reaching their goal. “In my new book, Emotionally Intelligent Game Changers: 101 Simple Ways to Win at Work + Life, www.theotherkindofsmart.com, I share tips about how to overcome setbacks and use them as building blocks towards success.” Organizations that encourage and reward new ideas and risk taking, attract those who are willing to go beyond what they are already know and do will be valued, encouraged, and rewarded. If we are in stagnant organizations that are tied to the status quo, we will feel frustrated and come to the realization that we are in the wrong environment. This wall helps us move towards making changes that we need to find a workplace that will meet our need to challenge ourselves and grow.
Another way we can view failure is as a step to us developing our creative, problem-solving side. By examine what didn’t work, we can expand our imaginations and thinking processes. The best way to learn is by doing and the more and different things we attempt to do, the more we set ourselves up for learning. Psychologist, author and educator, Martin Seligman, one of the proponents of the Positive Psychology Movement did some ground-breaking work on optimism. He discovered that optimists view setbacks differently from pessimists. Optimists see setbacks as temporary, and don’t take them personally. They don’t see them as an indication there is something wrong with them. Viewing failures in this manner can help build our optimism. “Developing our emotional intelligence, in particular the competencies of Self-Awareness and Self-Management enable us to build our resilience, our ability to ‘bounce back’ and our ability to reframe setbacks to learning opportunities.” Debbie Muno, Managing Director Genos North America https://www.genosnorthamerica.com/
