Failing Successfully
A friend recently shared this article with me about All The Cool Girls Get Fired, a new book about moving on after you lose your job. I haven’t read the book yet, but I am glad these ideas are being discussed and shared. There is so much shame associated with not being where you want to be in life because of someone else’s decision. There is a quote in the article about boys being raised to be brave and girls being raised to be perfect, as an explanation for the shame women feel when they face failures or setbacks. I don’t necessarily agree with this being gendered, as I know brave women and men who want to be perfect. What resonated with me is the perfection piece, especially for those of us who excelled in school and decided to pursue advanced study.
Many of the PhD students I work with have not had much experience with failure. Success in school came easily to them and they expected to continue on a relatively smooth path. The PhD becomes a different kind of challenge, as academic work gets more complicated than getting a good grade on the test. The job market isn’t smooth, and neither is navigating a career in academia, even under more favorable circumstances. If you are facing failure for the first time in your 20s, or even later in life, in some ways you are lucky compared to those who struggled when they were younger. But at the same time, setbacks can be harder to manage once you’ve been successful: you expect for things to go your way, because you did the “right” things. In some ways the failure can even be an identity trigger, like, I’m not someone who fails!
So, how do we handle it? What can we learn when we don’t succeed at these bigger, pivotal moments, like landing a job or getting a promotion? How do we stay positive and keep trying, or decide when to change course? Growth mindset tells us we need to learn from our mistakes, but it can feel hard to learn when so many factors are out of our control. As we learn from sports, mistakes and failure are just part of the process. It happens to everyone. We take time to mourn, and then we dust ourselves off and keep going. And once we get through it, and we move on to our next adventure, we are better prepared to face all of the different things life may throw at us.
What does failing successfully mean to you? How are you managing your setbacks these days? I would love to chat.
