StarLightWalker – Personal and Spiritual Growth

Embracing Setbacks: Harnessing the Power of Failure

 Print This Post July 19, 2008 on 6:30 pm | In Creativity, Diet, Emotional, Exercise, Failure, Fear, Fitness, Health, Physical, Spiritual | 5 Comments

If you are anything like me, the idea of failure conjures up all sorts of negative images and feelings.  Indeed, one of the hardest lessons for me to learn (and one that I must admit that I am still in the process of learning) has been understanding the fact that failing at a particular task does not mean that I am a failure.  

I am not sure where this tendency to identify myself with the outcome of my efforts originally came from, but there is no doubt that it is a deeply ingrained, habitual pattern of evaluating myself and the world.  For as far back as I can remember I have always had a sense of needing to “earn” love and acceptance - by getting good grades in school, merit badges in Boy Scouts, and later in life through promotions and salary increases at work.  Within this worldview my value as a person was not something intrinsic; rather, it was tied to my achievements, and as a result there was a strong sense that success made me a better person and failure made me a worse person.  Given this habitual perceptual frame, it takes persistence and an almost stubborn optimism to remind myself that I am not my outcomes!

When you step back and examine the premise of this worldview, it becomes apparent that there is something insidiously self-sabotaging in the agreements that support its structure.  In what way could failure – whether at school, at work, or even at play – cause me to be a worse person?  And for that matter, why would success cause me to be a better person?  What linkage is there between my ability to perform a task or achieve a goal and my worth as a person?  When you give it a bit a thought, it becomes clear that this premise is absurd.  My value as a person has nothing to do with whether or not I succeed or fail at a particular task.  Certainly from a spiritual perspective my worthiness is an intrinsic property of my existence – my value lies in the fact that I am a unique manifestation of the Divine (or in more traditional terms, a child of God) – and is in no way dependent on what I do or do not achieve.

The absurdity of the idea of earning value through success becomes particularly clear if we apply it to very specific examples.  Am I a better person if I am successful at badminton, and a worse person if I fail to hit the birdy?  Am I somehow a better person if I succeed at making a souffle’?  If it is clear in these instances that the entire premise of the statement is nonsense, why would we buy into this worldview when the subject is the grades I get in school, the level of income I earn, or the job title I have at work?  Yet how many of us, particularly success-driven self improvement nuts like me, have bought into this worldview?

It is not a coincidence that I am writing about the topic of setbacks and failure after my long hiatus in posting to this blog.  This website is my primary creative outlet at the moment, and the frequency of my blog posts is a fairly accurate indicator of how well my creative endeavors (and indeed my life in general) has been going.  Without going into all of the gory details right now, let’s just say that it has been a very challenging few months, with significant setbacks in a number of areas: my physical condition and health, my emotional equilibrium, my career, my relationships, and even my spiritual foundation.  Yet in spite of these numerous failures and setbacks, it has also been a period of intense growth and transformation.  More precisely, because of these failures and setbacks it has been a period of intense growth.

My experience has been that failure and setbacks almost always precede significant personal growth.  In this respect our personal growth mirrors a phenomenon that we are all familiar with in nature – punctuated growth.  Perhaps the most emblematic example of punctuated growth is the dramatic transformation that a butterfly undergoes through the process of metamorphosis.  During the majority of its life as a caterpillar its form remains more or less constant, with the only change being a gradual increase in size.  But as the seasons change the larva undergoes dramatic transformations from caterpillar into a pupa and then from pupa into a butterfly.  Although the emergence of a butterfly from its chrysalis occurs in response to changes in the environment and the passage of time rather than failures or setbacks, the pattern of growth that it undergoes exhibits many similarities to what I have experience in my own personal growth.

Perhaps an even better example from nature is captured in the theory of punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary biology.  This theory posits that the emergence of new species is the result of a small segment of a population being isolated at the periphery of the ancestral range.  Because these isolated populations live at the outer fringes of the ancestral range – regions that mark the edge of ecological tolerance for the ancestral form – they are subject to intense selective pressures.  The combination of isolation and intense selective pressures means that favorable variations spread quickly, and thus under this theory the development of new species is much more likely in these fringe populations than in the much larger, more stable central populations.  Indeed, these central populations exhibit a strong homogenizing influence by virtue of the sheer size of the population coupled with the fact that these central populations are located where the ancestral species adaptation best match the ecological conditions that favor survival.

In the realm of personal growth, my experience is that failure and crisis tend to stimulate growth whereas success tends to limit the opportunity for growth.  When we succeed there is little pressure to examine our ideas or behaviors, as the fact that we are succeeding indicates that our current strategies and tactics are working.  As a result, when we are on a roll – succeeding – we tend to repeat our behaviors in an effort to maintain the status quo.  As a result, while these periods may exhibit incremental growth and improvement they very seldom precipitate radical breakthroughs or transformation.  Rather it is failure that is the harbinger of dramatic growth and transformation.

When we fail we tend to ponder – to re-examine our strategies and tactics – and in so doing we are often forced to question the core assumptions and beliefs that are the foundation and basis for our current life strategies.  Failure urges us to question the foundational concepts of ourselves and our world, and in so doing encourages us to expand our perspective.  And it is in this questioning of our preconceived views that miracles and magic occur.