You actually want to fail and learn to embrace making mistakes. Really! You want to enjoy the experience and wallow in the joy of discovery, recovery, and retrying - finally getting it. You might need to work through being embarrassed by not succeeding, not being perfect. Failing, recognizing when you fail, and knowing how to respond to failure is a repeated theme in many of the references used in this course - Dweck (2017), Bain (2012), and Ericsson and Pool (2016). These are relatively recent works and the general thought is that you learn new skills and improve existing ones by pushing yourself and learning from your mistakes. You have to take chances and be ready to fail and fail repeatedly (not the same mistake though). For anything substantial, it is not one-and-done when it comes to skill. It will take practice, making mistakes, and a conscious attempt at improvement. As the phrase goes, you have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. The theme is old - “our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall” (attributed to Confucius).
To improve, you need to know that you are ‘failing’ or not meeting expectations. This may require a comparison to a benchmark, criticism, marks, evaluations and other forms of feedback. You need to know what sucked and what did not. This can hurt - your self-esteem might be lower, your expectations and standards for yourself might not be met, and if you do not get it the first time, you might just say “I’m done” and walk away. Pushing through failure is called having “grit”. This means determination and perseverance, or as the Oxford Dictionary puts it: having courage and resolve, strength of character. Angela Lee Duckworth’s TED talk (see ref) on grit is worth watching!
Some ideas for how to deal with failing or getting discouraged
Resetting your expectations, developing benchmarks or comparisons that are just incrementally beyond where you are now. You will not learn any significant skill overnight. Set a target you can hit.
Consciously reflect on why you failed to meet your target. If you actually exceeded it - why? If you failed to meet it - why? What would you have done differently - tweaked, adjusted, prepped for differently?
From your list of issues, work on ONE thing. You want to focus on one thing at a time. Be patient. You do not need to solve all of your problems at once.
Break down complex skills (like problem solving) into smaller pieces - identify the first one that needs experimentation and work, and do not worry about the other bits that come later.
Try to work with someone or have someone that will act as a coach - someone to talk to, think it through with, get feedback from. Someone who will call it for what it is; someone who will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.
Try to improve for yourself, not for others. Do not worry so much about what others say or think. And, probably best to keep your experimenting and learning off social media.
Make sure that what you are trying to do is at least in the realm of feasibility. Do not try to climb a tree attempting to reach the moon - it just ain’t gonna work and there will be lots of self-esteem problems when you fail and fail and fail and fail.
Have some kind of stopping criteria that is not too soft. When are you going to give up and ask for help? Part of learning is knowing when to stop and try some thing different, look at it from a different angle, or look at something similar for inspiration.
Give yourself enough time and resources to fail. If you wait till it is too late to recover, the stress can be high. If you do not anticipate some issues, you might not have any resources left for a second try.
If you do not plan for failure or think it can happen, you will not be happy. You can hope for the best, but you should have a backup plan and another idea or scheme up your sleeve.
Dweck, C.S. (2017). mindset – the new psychology of success, Updated Ed., Carol. S. Dweck.
Bain, K. (2012). What the Best College Students Do, Belknap Press, MA.
Ericsson, A., and R. Pool (2016). Peak – Secrets from the new science of expertise, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, NY.
