Failure is an Option
From Path2 Coaching
I failed as a spouse; my marriage ended in divorce. I failed as a parent; my sons are emotionally damaged from bad parenting. I failed in my career; I resigned from a promotion that I dreamt about for years. Hell, I failed at trying to end my life. As a recovering perfectionist, my fear and loathing of failure drove all my accomplishments more than my desire to succeed. The universe, however, is a diligent teacher, and by dodging failure, I was lacking vital lessons that I needed to get to the next level of happiness and fulfillment.
Thomas Edison is attributed as saying “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” It’s a lovely way to reflect on failure with grace. However, in the heat of the moment of failure, it sounds more like saccharine bullshit spoken from the summit of success.
In both the meaningless and monumental failures in my life, I resisted each with fervor and Herculean willpower. And in doing so, I created more collateral damage than was necessary and remained ignorant of the ultimate lesson that was going to come from failure.
Most recently, I’ve been putting my failures in parenting under a microscope to see what went wrong, how it went wrong, and why it went wrong. One of the revelations was that my parenting style and expectations were guided by an inner critic that was concerned with outcomes and appearance.
The future outcomes I wanted for my older son’s life (a good education, good values, a promising professional life, etc) dictated how I raised him. However, there is no way to predict what outcomes will occur. So, the day-to-day struggle of trying to make progress toward those imagined outcomes created real friction and damage with no guarantee of any influence on the ultimate outcome. That daily effort fractured our relationship to the point where we could not interact in a healthy and productive way.
The appearances I was concerned with centered around how “authority figures” (teachers, coaches, mentors, community members) viewed my son, wanting him to be perceived a “good” kid and not as a ruffian. So, the daily battle was trying to impose guardrails on his behavior for the benefit of how others viewed him, neither thing I can (or should) control. My constant meddling generated feelings of oppression and fed his desire to be radically independent.
Refusing to fail did much more damage to our dynamic and his mental and emotional health than outright neglect. Without the eventual break and grand failure, I would not have the self-awareness regarding my thoughts and actions surrounding parenting, and likely would have continued to battle on these efforts.
In the aftermath of failure, I could reflect on what happened with a level of extreme ownership. Among the revelations that came to light was that my fear and loathing of failure directly led to more drastic failures. I ignorantly created the failure that I feared. When I acknowledged this, the most important lesson I learned in my martial arts training came to mind as the guiding principle that would prevent such resistance to failure: instead of pursuing “success” and avoiding “failure,” I should be approaching life as pursuing “mastery and growth” and avoiding being “fixed or stagnant.”
If I approached parenting as a desire to improve my behavior as a father in a way that is best for each of my sons, then the daily struggles wouldn’t be labeled “failures” by my inner critic, but rather would be labeled as positive refinements to my parenting.