We begin life with moments of helplessness. As children we exist in a world of adult expectations. How we first perform these tasks can make us seem unskilled, weak, and incapable of surviving on our own. The earliest message we are given is that our abilities are limited and our capacities to achieve success or positively affect our future are doomed to failure.
It would seem that at an early age, we are already beginning to build a house of failure laid on a foundation of millstones made of an equal mix of lack of trust in our own skills and abilities and a limited understanding that we have options in how we live our lives. As we build this edifice of self doubt, we reinforce the notion that we can't do anything without mistakes, errors and clumsiness. We begin to believe that we will never succeed at anything, and that we will forever remain stuck in a pattern of failure. We accept the message that our options and the roles we assume are limited in possibilities and scope. Such a life offers little reward beyond the sense of the familiar. Being stuck can seem easier than the risk of trying something new, different or unfamiliar. Remaining in character easily becomes a comfortable but unproductive habit. If this loyalty to failure is at all painful, it is at least a familiar pain that we understand and can tolerate. We know what to expect. There are no surprises. We get to live out our tragic expectations of failure, rather than having to adjust or improvise our response to something new.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, "There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed, failure is the fate allotted."
It would seem that the joy we can experience over life's successes and its negation are opposite sides of the same coin. If that be so, then the coin can be understood to serve not just to cover our eyes in death or seal our fate to failure, but can be tossed in wager. It can open us to infinite possibilities of life, a life filled, to be sure, with uncertainty, but also brimming over with joyous and affirming possibilities.
Chance, that comes with the toss of a coin, allows for the creation of new understandings of the nature and function of failure in our lives. The flip of the coin allows for new ways to approach life on an equal footing. Like the coin toss, each flip always has the same possibility for success or failure. The odds never change.
Many of us receive the message early in life that we didn't measure up. My black and blue thumbs sent a throbbing message, like the beat of a drum, that I was incompetent using tools, a klutz. As a member of a school youth choir at the age of seven or eight, I was told to mouth the words because I could not sing on key. To this day I am embarrassed to sing in public. This was one of my early messages of failure. The message, unlike my singing, was loud and clear; I did not measure up to someone else's expectations.
Many of us have been told over and over again that we didn't think, believe, or feel something that we really did. And if we did, there must be something wrong with us. We were too emotional, too sensitive, not sensitive enough, not good enough.
If that was part of the messages you received growing up, how would you or any of us be able to have confidence that what we did could ever be a success? By the process of elimination, failure was our only option.
As I grew into adulthood, those messages led to behavior guaranteed to produce failure. As a young commissioned salesman just out of college, I spent many an hour literally sitting under a bridge rather than making my sales calls. Yes, I was afraid of failure, but even more so afraid of success, which was a stranger. Weren't we told as infants to beware of strangers? As a parent, I repeated over and over again to my kids the ditty, Stranger-Danger, Stranger Danger. Well, success was a stranger, and therefore dangerous. I would have to change how I thought of myself if I invited success into my life. I might even have to learn to be happy with my work and more, globally, with my life. I was not prepared to do that, for I had learned my lessons well. I would continue to do what was familiar rather than risk change. I believed I truly wanted to succeed, yet I think, on reflection, I was also afraid of that very success I craved.
Most people say that they are often motivated by a fear of failure, but I think that is the wrong way to conceptualize it. Many of us are really afraid of success. Success demands a lot from us. People would expect more from us. We would expect more of ourselves. We would finally be free to improvise, to choose success over failure.
I think this approaches a key understanding of failure and why it is so very hard to break out of the scripted role we seemed destined to play. Failure, like success, can be programmed. If, all our lives, we are told that we can't, we probably won't. To go against our type casting puts us at risk of becoming what we are not programmed to be. In other words, we are freed to become a person of accomplishment, a success, but achieved only through an act of disloyalty.
Let me explain. By not playing out the role we have been assigned, we have been disloyal to a family dynamic that needs us to fulfill the role of failure.
Each person in our family of origin has a specific role to play. Our family is like a Calder mobile. If one piece of the sculpture is out of place or missing, the entire sculpture must find a new balance point. So, if we are to change, we must reconfigure what failure means, just as the sculptor must find a new stasis. That is so hard because all the members of the system must change. They must all overcome their inertia and be willing to accept change in each other as well as in themselves.
Let me illustrate what I mean. There is the silly story about the legendary miser Jack Benny. He is walking down a dark street and is approached by a robber who demands, "Your money or your life." The demand is followed by Jack Benny's complete and utter silence. The listening radio audience has tensed because they know how cheap he is thought to be. Again the mugger insists, more loudly and menacingly this time, "Your money or your life." Again Benny is silent. With rising anger the mugger shouts, for the last time, "Your money or your life." After another long pause, Benny finally whines, "I'm thinking, I'm thinking."
This illustrates how difficult it is to give up an overly scripted life, to free ourselves to re-imagine the idea of failure as a means to change and success. People need to remember that there must have been a time in their lives when they did succeed and felt good about it. People can feel so locked in their prescribed roles that they can't remember when they ever felt successful or ever gave themselves the freedom to experience success.
When people finally feel that they are allowed to change, to do as they please, to succeed as they can, many are still afraid to come out from under the bridge because they have grown strong in their belief that they cannot handle new situations. They have become competent failures, frightened and uncertain of success.
This is the very moment that calls for a reframing of the word itself. What is failure exactly? Webster's New World Dictionary defines it variously as to be lacking or insufficient, or to be deficient or negligent, in an obligation, duty, or expectation, to default. Pretty harsh. But we stopped too soon. The fifth definition is to be unsuccessful in a desired end, to be unable to do or become. So what!
The reality of life is that we learn more about who we are through our failures than our so-called successes. By definition, success is a favorable outcome. That is often what failure becomes, given enough time and evolution of thinking and understanding. Let me illustrate what I mean by using one of my more stunning business failures.
I had been hired as a branch manager of a large sales company. I approached this new position with great hope of making significant and productive changes to a moribund office. In my eagerness to succeed, I ignored the fact that I was the fifth branch manager of this particular office in just over two years. My ego said that I could do what my four predecessors could not. I quickly discovered that I was not going to make any changes, that I would, within seven months, find myself out of a job and a corespondent in a lawsuit.
Without a doubt, this was the worst business experience of my working life, a failure by any standard of judgment; but not because this experience jolted me into a new way of thinking. I learned more about myself from that incident than from any success that I ever had. I learned about my limits and the power of misplaced ego. I learned that people bring their private personal lives to work, that whatever dysfunctions they have will show up in the work place, and in church, for that matter.
Thankfully, I grew through my failure, hopefully becoming wiser about people and more charitable and compassionate with myself. Not a bad thing to learn through failure.
It turns out that failure is the best teacher. We are humbled in our humiliation, which can open the door to new learning. The immediacy of such learning turns out to be the most reliable touchstone for what is worth knowing. As Sheldon Kopp writes, "Openness to the undermined meaning of each individual moment transforms ordinary external events into extraordinary personal experiences." With this kind of new understanding and openness, we are all able to give up our pre-programmed behavior, once we learn that life itself could be our guru. These unwelcome assaults, characterized as failure, have added to my understanding that my life is mine to live and do with as I choose, including giving up unrealistic expectations.
Sheldon Kopp says it all with the title of his book "Even a Stone Can Be a Teacher." A story is told of an Indian holy man who lived in a forest with his disciples. He taught them to see God in all things. One day while deep in the forest gathering wood for a sacrificial fire, the disciple heard a voice shouting, "Out of the Way! Out of the way. A mad elephant is coming!" All but one young disciple ran for their lives. Kneeling in the path of the lumbering beast, he sang its praises.
The mahout who drove the elephant screamed at him to run away, but the disciple would not budge. Seizing the stubborn student in its trunk, the elephant tossed him aside and charged on down the forest path. Bruised and unconscious, he had to be carried back to the hermitage by the other disciples.
When he began to recover, the injured young man was asked by his teacher why he had not run from the charging elephant. The battered disciple protested, "You taught us that all creatures are manifestations of God. Why should I have made way for the elephant? I am God. The elephant is God. Should God be afraid of God?" The holy man smiled. Speaking softly, he said, "Yes, my child, it is true that you are God and that the elephant is also God. But why did you not listen when God's voice called out from the mahout yelling to you to run away.?"
Obviously, he experienced a failure to listen to all of life's lessons, not just some. I suspect the next time the elephant charges, the disciple will turn aside.
This disciple has experienced a new paradigm of understanding, in which his painful failure can now be seen as a friend capable of preventing a possible future fatal failure, the moral being that we learn much from friends and failures. And if they happen to be one and the same entity, so much the better.
Let it Be !
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