Facing Failure: When the Play Dough Container Won't Open

Yesterday my daughter "failed" to be able to take off the cover to the play dough container.  In some ways it is hard to call this a failure because she is two and those containers are tough.  But it is a failure none the less.  On a small scale for sure, but she got frustrated, didn't want her brothers help and finally abandoned the Play Dough all together and did something else.  It seemed to me almost like a microcosm of what happens on a larger scale all the time.  We try something, the result is not what we like, or expect and we abandon it for something else.  And we give it a "nasty" word.

You failed to get the promotion.  You didn't succeed in getting to spend more time with your family.

You failed at your marriage.  You didn't succeed in leaving someone who never made you happy.

We celebrate our successes and hide our failures and this takes so much work.  And is counter productive.  In a recent study on failure conducted by ES Communications they asked respondents about their experiences with failure. 

The first two things that jumped out at me was that when asked if failure was a private thing 2/3 of respondents said no.  Individuals perceive that their failures will be public knowledge.  This fact along plays a large role in how people feel about failure.  Since we feel it will become public we are forced not just to think about the failure but also how we will handle how other people in our life will handle the failure.

 The second area of interest was around the areas of our lives where people feel they experience failure.  At the top of that list is friendships.  Followed by work and then failure with our significant other/spouse.  When we think about these results the first thing that comes to mind is that our self-reporting is flawed.  We feel the worst about our interpersonal failures and so we report on them as being more prevalent then they are.

 

Failure isn't easy.  From the moment we realize we can't open the Play Dough container ourselves to our inability to make up with a friend to feeling like we can't buy someone the gift we want because we don't have the money.  All feed our desire to succeed and our need to be praised and recognized for something good.  What if we could turn it all around.  Change our thinking about what it means to fail...could it become something positive?