Failure as Your Path to Resilience
By: Martin Van Duyse
Tags: Resilience, Success, Psychology, Positive Thinking, Positive Psychology

Failure as Your Path to Resilience

Lessons from positive psychology

This is not a feel-good story about how good failure is and how it sets you up for success. Or how successful entrepreneurs succeeded because they first failed many times.

That is simply not true; these are lies by people trying to arbitrarily identify the magic formula for success. The truth is that there is no such formula. How will failure make you learn how to succeed? There are a million ways to fail, but just a few to succeed.

No, this is an article about how to learn from failure and to develop coping mechanisms to deal with it. This post is about resilience. It’s one of the superpowers that sets you up for greatness.

Success is not what it seems

Failure is the antithesis of success. But what is success? Because we need to understand success before we know what failure is. Too often, we mix this up with what our consumption-obsessed society defines as success. A good paying job, a large house and other status symbols make you seem successful.

These symbols do not necessarily represent success, however. Our misconception that money equals success shows in an overall decline in happiness ratings: in the mid-1980s, 61 percent of working Americans reported they were satisfied with their jobs, compared to a mere 43 percent by 2010.

Success is instead about a sense of accomplishment and meaning. We will only get a sense of accomplishment when we have to work hard for something. It is about the struggle, and it is about making a meaningful contribution to others.

Earning more and more money, it appears, does not motivate us. Money is a precondition, but once we make enough money, it stops driving us. Therefore, we need to do the work that we love for a cause that we find worthy. It is about intrinsic motivation.

Failure, therefore, is very personal as each person is motivated by different work and rewards. However, most of us start with a twisted sense of what failure is. Is this when you get fired from your job? Or when you don’t get hired in the first place? Or are we failing when we’re making less than 50k per year?

To be sure about this, we first need to be clear about what we want in life. “Failing” in your early twenties, by not landing a steady and well-paying job, for instance, might be the very thing to force you to explore your interests and strengths.

And you’ll likely develop coping mechanisms that will make you more resilient later on in life. Take the story of the Pulitzer price winning journalist Charles Duhig, for instance:

Some of my classmates thought I was making a huge mistake by ignoring all the doors H.B.S. had opened for me in high finance and Silicon Valley. What they didn’t know was that those doors, in fact, had stayed shut — and that as a result, I was saved from the temptation of easy riches. I’ve been thankful ever since, grateful that my bad luck made it easier to choose a profession that I’ve loved.

And then you have people who seem wildly successful. To the outside world at least. Take the bankers with seven-digit incomes. A lot of them are wealthy and “successful”, but they’re doing work that they hate. Some people have a lot going for them. But they will hit a wall later in life, realizing that money alone is not the answer. As Jim Carrey famously said:

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.

Late bloomers have a rough start. This can have two significant advantages, however. First of all, failure early on forces you to rethink what you find important and where your calling lies. You’ll find your calling on the intersection of your interests with your innate talent.

Second, failure forces you to rethink what your strengths are. Together, this will make you more resilient. You will not obtain success, however, by failure alone. You have to explore your talents and flourish by utilizing them purposefully. This is where positive psychology comes in.

Resilience and positive psychology

Positive psychology is a relatively new part of the social sciences and deals with mental wellbeing. This as opposed to traditional psychology, which primarily focuses on mental illnesses.

But let’s say the “patient” is cured of this mental illness. That does not necessarily mean that he/she will happy, but only not unhappy. Positive psychology takes another approach, though.

This stream of research primarily offers two ways to make you more resilient, which are to start working with your signature strengths and to develop coping mechanisms. It is the science of human flourishing.

Exploring and working with your signature strengths

Especially after a big failure, you should assess which character strengths come most naturally to you. You should use your signature strengths to your advantage by picking jobs and tasks you usually excel at.

This kind of test is called a “VIA — Values in Action inventory — strength finder”. I completed the test, and my top 4 strengths are honesty, judgment, self-regulation, and bravery. Other strengths that you can assess with this test are, for example, humor, kindness, perseverance, and creativity. Research shows that once we’ve identified our signature strengths, we need to apply at least four of those in our work to find lasting happiness and gratification.

Developing coping mechanisms

There are many coping mechanisms that you can use to reframe situations more realistically and to give you a more positive outlook on life. One example is to write down three positive things that happened to you during the day before you go to sleep. This is a straightforward exercise, but it has been shown that this will make you happier in just a few weeks.

Another example is the ABCDE method. With this method, you create a diary of sorts whenever something bad happened to you. It is a structured approach in which you reframe the adversity you went through. The letters in ABCDE all stand for a separate step in this process:

A stands for adversity. Here you write down what happened to you. In this step, you objectively describe what happened. You create some distance from the situation by doing this.

B stands for beliefs. What were your automatic thoughts when the adversity happened? Write these down along with your emotions and physical sensations.

C stands for the consequences of the beliefs. How did you behave after what happened? Did you start a fight? Did you start worrying?

D stands for disputation. In this step, you actively reframe your beliefs to something more optimistic and realistic. Usually, we think of all de worst-case scenarios which are not likely to happen.

E stands for energization. By reframing, you should also think of a realistic course of action you should take. When I complete this step, I often even conclude that I don’t have to do anything except to stop worrying. You write down your new beliefs here and the new feeling or the way you want to feel.

Both topics have been shown to have positive effects on people’s mental health. Next to this, positive psychology offers a lot more tools for developing resilience, each of which deserves a separate post. I advise you to learn more about positive psychology and resilience if you’re interested in the topic.

Why late bloomers have an edge

Late bloomers have an advantage over others who succeed early on but fail later. They develop resilience and can bounce back more quickly, as they’ve already developed coping mechanisms to deal with adversity. Early disappointments force compromise and make you think about your key strengths.

Therefore, late bloomers will navigate the challenges of life more easily than others. Fortunately, it is never too late to learn resilience at a later age. In the end, you should always choose to invest in yourself by developing resilience, no matter what your age is. There are many tools out there, and you only have to look for them and put them to good use.