Reputation Building 101: Rethinking Failure

Fact:  If any of us believed that falling down once meant that we'd never learn to walk, we'd all be crawling on our hands and knees today.
 
If falling off of a bike repeatedly meant you'd never learn how not to fall, Schwinn would have gone out of business a long time ago and there'd be no such thing as the Tour de Cure.

I'll assume that your toddler mindset didn't let many tumbles, wobbles and falling on your butt keep you from walking upright.  Getting your knees skinned and dumping your bike more than once didn't end your quest to be a skilled rider.

Know why you can walk, ride a bike, write, read, ski, and so on?  Because your younger self didn't know what failure was.  It wasn't an option, so there was nothing keeping you from mastering those skills.  You picked yourself up, dusted yourself off, and started all over again.  And again.  And again.  You figured out how to balance yourself just right so that you fell less and less often.  You eventually got really good at it.  You took repeated failures and used them as learning opportunities.

That's called resilience.
At the risk of sounding like an old fuddy-duddy, I think that our ever-growing reliance on technology has been the death-knell of resilience.  I'm noticing that people who seem to always have a phone or tablet bonded to their hands, or folks who spend uncountable hours in front of a computer screen, are less skilled at dealing with obstacles that life throws their way.
  
The 24/7/365 availability of information and communication opportunities have replaced the practice-til-you-get-it method of building and honing academic, social and interpersonal skills.  It has also taken failure out of the realm of possibilities, and turned it from a singular event into how to describe oneself.

The result is a population that doesn't know what to do when things go wrong: 

• When they don't do something right the first time (or the second time.  Or the third).  
• When losing a competition and getting angry for not receiving a consolation prize.
• Giving up when learning something new and it doesn't go perfectly right away.
• How to lose gracefully and with sportsmanship.
• How to take failure as an opportunity to grow and learn and do better.

We don't need consoling when we fail. Or a trophy for participation.  We need to build grit.  Rethink what we can learn from the experience. Show our tenacity.  Pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again...until we get it right.   


All images courtesy of Google Images, unless otherwise noted.

(c) 2011-2016 Robyn King. All Rights Reserved.