Stop Setting Yourself Up To Fail
"Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." ~ Winston Churchill
Let's talk about a topic that strikes fear into the hearts of many of us - failing.
I don't know anything that will strike fear into the hearts of the recovery perfectionists and overachievers faster than the idea of failing. However, I've come to realise that as perfectionists, we often set ourselves up to fail in subtle ways. I want to explore some of the common ways we do this and offer a different perspective on how to approach failure in a way that promotes learning and growth. So, if you're ready to challenge your perfectionist tendencies and learn how to stop setting yourself up to fail, keep reading.
I believe that the reason failure can be so daunting is because many of us tie our identities to our achievements. For me, my way of interacting with the world has often been trying to maintain the illusion that I know exactly what I'm doing, and that I'm constantly achieving and doing things. The mere thought of failing or making a mistake can become catastrophic. The consequences of failure can feel so heavy because it threatens my very identity, which is at the core of who I am and the ways I keep myself safe in the world. Of course, failing or making a mistake feels terrifying if your whole identity is at risk because of a mistake.
Despite this existential threat, we set ourselves to fail. One way we do this is through binary thinking.
Binary thinking - black-or-white, all-or-nothing - is a classic sign of perfectionist thinking. We set everything up as either a success or a failure. There's a certain simplicity in being able to categorise things in that way; life feels much easier when things fit into neat boxes. But it doesn't leave room for anything in between.
Which is a problem if, as a perfectionist, you set the threshold for success incredibly high. I often find myself struggling to meet the unrealistic standards I've set for myself. I remember feeling like a failure in school if I didn't get an A, calling my mum in floods of tears after nearly every exam.
Even when I don't explicitly expect things to be perfect, my threshold for success is still very high, which makes it much more likely for things to end up in the failure box.
Because my identity is tied up in my achievements, every time I fail, it triggers an existential crisis, leaving me asking, "Who am I if I'm not achieving?" This fear of failure can knock me out for days, leaving me stuck in a place of self-brutalisation with an activated nervous system. This kind of stress never leads to creative thought or positive change, and it leaves me feeling stuck and unsure of what to do next.
My typical response to failure is to quit and move on to something else - nothing to see here, folks!
But it means I'm not actually learning. And us perfectionists love to claim a love for learning. But this way of approaching life means we often don't set ourselves up to actually learn from what we're doing. We're afraid of making mistakes and failing, so we don't allow ourselves the opportunity to improve.
There is a different way of doing things. Rather than framing everything as good or bad, successful or failure, we can open up to the nuance and the grey space in between. Embracing experimentation and curiosity opens up the space for a middle way.
I love to ask myself questions and pose hypotheses. That way, an experience either gives me evidence for my hypothesis or it gives me evidence against it. Rather than telling myself I failed, I can get more curious about why something didn't work and what I can do differently next time. This leads to improvement, iteration, and growth.
This is learning.
So, next time you're working on something you care about, what would it be like to frame it as an experiment? How can you get yourself out of the trap of only seeing the binary good-or-bad and open yourself to all the wonderful, messy nuance in the middle?
Failing is hard enough as it is. Maybe it's time to stop setting yourself for it.