#52: Hack your fear of failure
Are you supportive and compassionate and generally nice to yourself on those days when you've disappointed yourself? So many of us aren't. We have no idea whether it's even possible. We tell ourselves that either we're flawlessly successful or we're embarrassing failures, and since none of us is flawlessly successful, we all spend far too much time beating ourselves up for being embarrassing failures, which is an incredible waste because there's actually a lot of space between success and failure, and it's where we all hang out pretty much all the time. What if you could inhabit this space comfortably, and work towards your goals imperfectly and fearlessly? Wouldn't you get more out of yourself if you could do that instead of that 'I'm a failure' thing you usually do? Snuggle up and listen, and your imperfect friend here will tell you how.
Episode transcript:
What do you find between success and failure? Everyone.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi everyone, and welcome to the first episode of 2023! I’m going to talk to you about something that I know is going to resonate with you, especially at this time of year, when so many of us are reflecting on the year that’s just ended and thinking about how we might like to do things differently this year. I was confronted with that new-year resolve as soon as I stepped outside this morning - literally. I went for a run, and there were a lot more people out running than there usually are. Noticeably more. People who, perhaps, have decided that 2023 is going to be the year they get in shape or start making healthier choices, perhaps. I found myself wondering how many of them I’d still be seeing running in a month’s time. Because you know what it’s like with the good intentions with which we start the new year: we go all-out for a few weeks, and then we run out of steam. We buy gym memberships in January and stop using them by February. I talked about this about a year ago, in episode #27: Your new year resolutions survival guide.
Describing the way we often lose interest in following through on our good intentions as ‘running out of steam’ isn’t quite right, though. It’s more complicated than that. It’s not just a matter of becoming gradually less invested in the goals we set for ourselves until we’re not working towards them at all any more. For a start, very often, those goals remain just as important to us after we stop making the effort as they were at the beginning. Those people who bought gym memberships in January and then work out religiously for 3 weeks still care about getting in shape in the middle of February, when they’ve stopped going. What’s happened, very often, is that after the initial push, they’ve skipped a couple of sessions, or they’ve treated themselves to a milkshake instead of the celery and wheatgrass juice that they were supposed to have, and then they’ve reacted by sort of throwing up their hands and saying, ‘ah, bollocks to it, I’ve failed, so I may as well forget the whole thing’. There’s this binary mentality: you’re either working towards whatever wholesome goal you’ve set for yourself, or you’ve failed. There’s no in-between. Our everyday language reflects this binary conception: we talk of ‘falling off the wagon’. Which calls to mind a situation where you’re either on the wagon or you’re not. And if you’re not, then that’s it, you’ve screwed it up. The wagon has moved along without you, carrying with it all those smug, virtuous people who haven’t messed up the way you have, and there you are, watching your good intentions disappear over the horizon while thinking about whether you can bear to start again from scratch. That’s why, for many people who are trying to stick to a strict diet, it all goes to pot when they make one slip up and eat something they’re not supposed to. Once you’re off the wagon, you’re off. Eating half a chocolate biscuit is just as much off the wagon as eating the entire packet - so get stuck in, you may as well. You’ve failed either way.
I think dealing with these sorts of setbacks is something many of us just don’t know how to do. We start out, when we’re formulating a goal to work towards, forming all these good intentions and thinking about how great it’s going to be when we achieve our goal. That image in our mind is all sunlit uplands, unsullied by all the imperfections and compromises and setbacks that we encounter when we actually go about trying to make our dreams a reality. Many of us don’t consider how we might respond when things don’t go as planned. We aren’t prepared for how to think about ourselves compassionately when we disappoint ourselves. It’s all or nothing. Success or failure. And that’s just not what reality is like. Reality is messy, and sunlit uplands don’t stay sunny indefinitely. You don’t get success without encountering, and dealing sensibly with, a fair bit of failure along the way - at least, not if what you’re setting out to achieve is something meaningful and significant.
I was talking about this with a coaching client recently. We were discussing the changes that they were planning to make in their life, and we got to talking about how they might respond to having a day in which they disappoint themselves in some way - you know, the usual: procrastination, self-deception, encountering some problem that wasn’t supposed to be there. They wanted to know: how can I possibly avoid feeling angry with myself if things don’t go to plan? And I talked about something I once did to help motivate my son, and which I often think back to when I’m trying to make positive changes.
My son used to suck his fingers, as many kids do. But he was getting to a stage where he was wishing that he didn’t suck his fingers. So I set him a challenge: if he could avoid sucking his fingers until his birthday, which was a couple of months away, I’d buy him a computer game of his choice - not for his birthday, but as a separate reward. But the moment I suggested this, I anticipated problems. His finger-sucking was a habit. He used to put his fingers in his mouth without thinking about it and often without noticing what he was doing. I was worried that the ‘sucky finger challenge’, as we called it, would end in tears: he’d mindlessly put his fingers in his mouth while he was watching TV or lying in bed, realise what he’d done when it was too late, and then be upset because it would mean failing the challenge and missing out on Super Smash Bros. So I talked this over with him, and we made a couple of modifications. The first was that we decided that the challenge would only apply when he wasn’t in bed. He could suck his fingers at night - we’d worry about that later. Stopping the daytime sucking was a realistic goal for the timeframe we had in mind; stopping at nighttime wasn’t. The second modification was that I gave him three ‘lives’, like in a computer game. If I caught him sucking his fingers during the challenge, he wouldn’t lose the challenge, but he’d lose a life. He’d lose the challenge only if he ended up losing all three lives. And that turned out to be a really important modification. It meant that the challenge wasn’t an all-or-nothing, on-the-wagon-or-off it affair. Losing a life would be disappointing and frustrating - as you’ll know if you’ve ever played a computer game - but it wasn’t the end of the world, and it didn’t mean failing the challenge. As it turned out, he did lose one of his lives, but only one. Losing a life ended up being the prompt he needed to be a bit more mindful of what he was doing with his hands. He won Super Smash Bros, my bank account was relieved of £40, and he no longer sucks his fingers. And buoyed up on his success in the challenge, he worked on weaning himself off the nighttime sucking all by himself, without any involvement from me.
I think that the two modifications we made to the sucky finger challenge are relevant for all sorts of things. Like my son’s finger-sucking, lots of the ways we slip up when we work towards our goals result from habitual behaviour that we engage in mindlessly. We procrastinate, and don’t realise we’re doing it until we’re on our second article about what hair products Meghan Markle can’t live without. We forget, until we’re about to fall asleep at night, that we didn’t take the vitamins that we’d promised ourselves to take every morning. And then it’s, oh fuck, I’ve fallen off the wagon, and I’m back to where I was before I even started this challenge. What a waste. What can we do to be more supportive to ourselves as we try to make positive changes?
First, just as my son and I decided that we’d focus on his daytime finger-sucking and ignore the nighttime stuff at first, you can ask yourself whether it would help to be a bit more nuanced with whatever it is you’re setting out to achieve. Yesterday I saw a Facebook post in a Garmin group I belong to. One of the members was upset because they had set themselves the target of doing 10,000 steps every day without fail in 2023, but only a few days into January they missed a day because they were ill. Now, you don’t get to do 10,000 steps every day without fail without a fair amount of luck and careful planning. People get ill, end up having to put in an extra long day at work, get on a 12-hour flight, and so on. So, ask yourself: how can I support myself in achieving my goal? And one way might be to reign it in a little bit and build in some flexibility. Rather than ‘10,000 steps every day without fail’, it could be ‘10,000 steps 5 days a week’ or ‘10,000 steps except when I’m ill’. Bear in mind that while the way you formulate the goal might not matter to you at the beginning, when you’re full of hope and eager to get going, it may well matter to you further down the line, when you’re tired and the novelty has worn off and you really just need a realistic goal that’s a step in the right direction, rather than something uncompromisingly idealistic.
And the second thing: give yourself some extra lives. It’s a way you can cushion the blow when you don’t make the sort of progress you were hoping you’d make. It’s a way of avoiding the all-or-nothing, the on-or-off-the-wagon. No one wins when you slip up and then hate yourself and give up and go back to where you were before you started. This way, you don’t fail. You just lose a life. The way my son and I did it with the sucky finger challenge was pretty simplistic - three lives for the whole challenge - but there’s scope to play with it a bit. Perhaps your lives get renewed each month. Perhaps there are things you can do to earn extra lives. Perhaps there are circumstances where you can level up, and give yourself some sort of reward. There’s so much space to explore here between complete, idealistic, perfect success and disastrous, embarrassing failure. So, use that space. It’s where you’re going to spend most of your time anyway.
I think the lives thing has another benefit too, in addition to softening that binary between success and failure. There’s something symbolic about it, about setting out to achieve a goal and deciding on how many lives you’re going to allow yourself. It’s a way of acknowledging that achieving what you want to achieve doesn’t have to involve perfection. It’s a way of being compassionate to yourself, of recognising that the path to success is probably going to be a bit rocky, and building that into the process - of making slip-ups business-as-usual. After all, meeting your goals having lost a few lives along the way is still meeting your goals, and there’s not really any important sense in which meeting your goals without losing any lives matters. My son lost one of his lives during his challenge, but he wouldn’t be any better off now if he hadn’t lost any. Either way, he stopped sucking his fingers. When we’re too hard on ourselves at those times when things aren’t going to plan, we lose sight of all this. Slip ups don’t matter. They only mean disaster if you let them.
The client I mentioned, who I was discussing all this with, had the following question: what if I run out of lives? Have you failed - like, properly failed - if you lose all your lives and still haven’t achieved your goal? Well, what do you reckon? You’re the one in charge of this game. You get to give yourself more lives if you like. You can change the rules, write cheat codes, whatever. Who cares? As long as you’re not giving up and telling yourself that it’s all over, anything goes. But I do want to sound a note of caution here. If you find yourself constantly slipping up as you work towards a goal, perhaps it’s worth reflecting on why. Is the goal realistic? Are you really committed to it? Have you taken on too much? Are you conflicted about it? Are you trying to achieve it for the wrong reasons - because someone else thinks you should, for example? Reflecting on things like this is only likely to be possible when you allow yourself to explore that space between success and failure and work towards a goal imperfectly and with self-compassion. If you throw in the towel the first time things go wrong, you miss the chance to make these sorts of insights about yourself.
Whatever you’re working towards at the moment, embrace the fuck-up. Lose one of your lives. It doesn’t matter. You’re making the rules here - remember that. Shrug your shoulders and keep going. Until next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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