No, not again!
You missed a work-out. You skipped a meal on your diet. You done messed-up.
I’ve always been really hard on myself when something like this happens. So much so that it’s difficult for me to “get back on it” again.
That is a huge problem because the weight of individual failures within the grand narrative of obtaining success is very minimal. In other words, if you sweat the small stuff, then it will be hard to achieve any degree of success, in any endeavor.
I believe that a further-understanding of what this truly means will help those who are paralyzed and traumatized by past failures, or even stricken by anxiety for future failings.
This article hopes to shed some light on why some people never get up and going again when things don’t go their way. And maybe inspire you to change your perspective so that you can.
Ouch!
When we inevitable mess up, our reptilian-mind associates the overall goal, let’s say, for example, getting your diet on track, with the pain of failure. Whenever we think of trying again, there will be a very strong aversion to it. Maybe pain receptors are going off like crazy, warning us, “impending failure, impending failure, impending pain, impending pain!”
My personality is high in neurotism and negative emotions. I’m a very open person. I took Jordan Peterson’s Understand Myself personality assessment and scored in the upper percentile in openness. Like, out of 100 men, I am more “open” than 99 of them.
This has its advantages since I’ll be open to trying anything… any business venture, any new work out protocol, any new genre of movie or book. At this point of my life I have quite the eclectic range of interests and a very good general knowledge of the world. All this despite the fact that I haven’t actually really explored the world very much.
Another advantage is that I’m agreeable and become likable to most people. I am compassionate and often “feel bad” for people.
The downside of being like this is that I’m kind of a “girly” dude.
As it applies to the concept of “failure”, the downside of a very open-type of personality is the suceptibleness to negative emotions.
Let me explain.
Getting out of the house is a battle.
The cliche adage about the word fear being an abbreviation for “false evidence appearing real” could not be more applicable. What’s weird is that I actually have a great time when I’m socializing, but inevitably, my repitilian-mind believes that it should not be something that I participate in.
Anyway, how does this apply to failure? High sensitivity to negative emotions could mean that failure, the negative emotions of failure, is much more traumatizing.
At this point, this article sounds a lot like I’m giving the most elaborate excuse as to why I don’t have my shit together yet. But nah…
Having a hard time overcoming failure doesn’t mean that we should stop trying altogether, but it just means that it will be much more of a battle, and will require us to have more of a understanding of ourselves.
This is something I’ve been striving to do for myself by applying the following principles:
Judge No More
Ah, negative emotions.
Your body doesn’t tell the difference between physical pain and psychological pain. Look it up. (I’m not gonna cite anything in this article because I am way too lazy).
We can all agree, then, if you were learning how to play the piano and every time you made a mistake or missed a whole practice, you would get tased by a law-enforcement grade taser that it would make learning how to play the piano a bit more difficult.
If you find that the prospect of failure or just past failures themselves, are setting you back from achieving your goals, getting your reps in, or just going out to experience what you need to experience, that probably means it’s something that is very difficult for you to overcome.
A lot of people that refer to themselves as “perfectionist” are just people that are averse to failure. Everything needs to be done perfectly or not done at all. Well, no one is perfect, and nothing was ever done perfectly. So these so-called perfectionist never do anything with their lives.
The path to success is messy, and nobody ever got to the top by doing every step perfectly.
Being a perfectionist means being someone who is setting unrealistic expectations on himself, and then using that unrealistic expectation as an excuse to not even bother.
Ironically, these unrealistic expectations would not be so unrealistic if they didn’t have them while striving towards them.
So, how do we keep our head in the game even when things are not going as we expect at the moment?
We must develop an understanding-type perspective for our situation instead of a judgmental one. This allieves some pain of failure, and helps us get back to focusing on what the goal itself was in the first place.
What do we need to understand about ourselves?
Yes, it will be difficult for me to achieve my goals, and I’ll need to be very aware of my negative feelings, but I can still keep trying going after my goals.
It’s No Big Deal
To take a nihilistic point of view for a second, all of this doesn’t matter in the long run.
It all goes away. Everything goes away. Eventually
Yeah, it’s pretty dark. But this is just a perspective, and not necessarily the only one that we can adopt.
A mature way of adopting this nihilistic perspective is to use it to build our tough skin. Which, as open and negative emotion-prone people, we need in order to achieve anything worthwhile in our lives.
Okay, so you did miss a work-out. You had a bad day at the office. You cheated on your diet.
And now your brain is on a negative-emotions loop. You think about how you’ll be judged, how you can never achieve your goals, how it’s all pretty useless, anyway. As a very neurotic person, our mind will automatically spin up ideas and narratives that match our negative emotions. This can get out of control and cripple us.
I’ve had these episodes take me out for weeks at a time. This was a huge obstacle for me. All the progress that I’ve achieved in the last few months go away very fast when I don’t do anything for a couple of weeks.
To think back, if I had just got right back up again after getting knocked down, like after a day or two, I’d probably be pretty far despite the initial failure.
This realization
That’s okay though, because I’ll have another chance to go after it again, and when I do get knocked down, it won’t keep me down. I will snap out of this negative loop and get right back in the game.
Get Right Back in The Game
I hope that some ideas in this article will help you at least alleviate the pain of failure and help you get back on your feet.
When we are on our personal growth journey we will run into obstacles and overcoming failure is one of them.
It will take a lot of self-awareness to overcome some negative philosophies we have on failure. Chances are, we have ingrained a lot of bad thought habits towards failure, and it will take time to shed these away.
By replacing these negative philosophies with positive self-talk and self-compassion, we will grow thicker skin, allowing us to not even skip a beat when striving towards greatness.
Good luck on your journey, and I hope to hear from you in the comments!