Failure Is An Art And How To Do It, Or Avoid It, Like A Champion

By Heather Cherry—

Failure as a noun means lack of success, omission of required action, or the collapse of a business. It can be embarrassing and painful to experience. Most will do anything to avoid failure—nobody wants to fail. “We want to prevent failure, and that’s why we come up with reasons for why we shouldn’t do things we want to do. We tell ourselves no because we don’t think we’re ready yet,” James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, says. “It’s also why we abandon our ideas. But ‘no’ rarely means impossible …. Usually if someone tells you no, what they really mean is ‘not right now or ‘not in that way.’”

Experts agree failure isn’t a destination but more so a redirection. But failing may prove more beneficial than succeeding. “We learn more from our failures than our successes. When we fail, not only do we find out what doesn’t work so that we can adjust our future attempts, but we learn about ourselves in the process and gain a bit of empathy toward others who might be struggling,” says Kealy Spring, Leadership Fellow Coach, BetterUp.

It’s time to reframe how we think about failing. Here’s how to do it like a champion.

What Is Failure?

The common understanding of failure is defined by whether or not you achieve a goal or mistakes made. This understanding is straightforward, but actually measuring failure is subjective.

This is because everything will eventually fail. Few innovations and experiments succeed, and businesses fail. Even the biggest success stories end at one point. Consider Thomas Edison who was deemed too stupid to learn anything and was expelled from school for being unteachable; MGM rejected Walt Disney for Mickey Mouse, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made many mistakes while launching the company.

Failure is inevitable and necessary—even beneficial, especially in learning. A 2019 online study shows that failure is a proven prerequisite for success. “If future attempts consistently build on past failures, the dynamics of repeated failures is revealed,” the study says. “A key difference between progression and stagnation is the tendency to use past failures.”

Psychology Of Failure

Learning from failure is easier said than done. In a 2022 paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, researchers Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach argue that most people are highly resistant to learning from their failures and that when they do, they often learn the wrong things. The authors say that the difficulty in learning from failure has two main reasons.

• Emotions: Failure is incompatible with feeling good about ourselves. “Contemplating failure is hard because it threatens experience. When a failure threatens people’s sense of self-worth, they react in ways to undermine not just their learning, but their mental and physical health,” the study authors say.
• Cognitive: Confirmation bias—the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories—prohibits you from learning from failure because we tend to seek information that aligns with our beliefs and expectations. Additionally, learning from failure is more cognitively demanding than learning from success.

In addition to emotions and cognitive challenges, sometimes the fear of failure (atychiphobia), an irrational and persistent fear of failing, is present.

A fear of failure stems from various sources. Potential causes of the fear of failure include:

• Upbringing: Parents have tremendous influence over their children in terms of fear of failure. Children whose parents were overprotective, critical, or placed a high value on accomplishments and success increase the likelihood of fear of failure.
• Perfectionism: An unmanaged need for perfectionism could induce a fear of failure.
• Trauma: Traumatic and high-stress events are linked to various mental health conditions—physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect are all possible causes of a fear of failure.
• Mental health: Underlying mental health conditions like anxiety and depression are linked to a fear of failure.

Signs of atychiphobia include procrastination, worry, hopelessness, and physical symptoms like fatigue or headaches. A little bit of worry about the outcome of a project or what people might think is perfectly normal—it’s problematic when it prohibits you from doing something you want to do.

Here are several signs you’re experiencing an intense fear of failure.

• Avoiding people or situations
• Chronic worry
• Frequent procrastination
• High distractibility, being pulled off task by irrelevant or unimportant things
• Hopelessness about the future
• Intense concerns about what others will think
• Physical symptoms (fatigue, headaches, digestive troubles, joint or muscle pain) that prevent working toward a goal

The fear of failure can lead to missed opportunities and problems in your everyday life. It can affect your outlook—extreme cases can impact your mental health, relationships, and overall quality of life.

Overcoming Failure

Overcoming failure or the fear of failure requires multiple strategies. These may include cognitive reframing, habit-building, self-awareness, and knowing when to retreat. “One of the hardest things in life is to know when to keep going and move on,” Clear says. “Perseverance and grit are key to success, but telling someone never to give up is terrible advice. Successful people give up all the time. If something is not working, smart people don’t repeat it endlessly—they revise, adjust, pivot, or quit.”

Even though we are naturally hard-wired not to learn from our mistakes, it is possible to learn from them. Use these three tips to bypass cognitive blind spots and help you learn from your mistakes.

1. Embrace transparency: Talking about failures from an objective point of view eliminates emotion, normalizes the mistake, and empowers learning behavior.
2. Avoid comparisons: Comparing yourself to others can be harmful in many ways. In most cases, you may be comparing yourself to someone’s finish line, and you’re just at the start.
3. Neutralize excuses and ambiguity: A natural response to failing is to blame. However, counteract cognitive biases by leveraging objective data rather than subjective assumptions or gut feelings.

Our deep-seated aversion to failure creates psychological barriers that prevent us from learning from our mistakes. Acknowledging these barriers is a step toward overcoming them.

Heather Cherry is a health and wellness writer and business coach. She helps businesses create strategic, creative messages and build effective content teams. She is the author of Market Your A$$ Off.