Learn to accept failures as part of your journey

A paradox. Few nouns would define my friend Paulo so well. Even the decades of camaraderie, since adolescence, did not allow me to understand the reasons for his projecting himself as someone who was flawed in everything he did. This despite evidence pointing to the opposite: talented illustrator, author of books, awarded at Anima Mundi, International Animation Festival. And, what mattered most to me: a dear friend and good conversationalist.

But that’s not how he saw himself. He thought there was a dark cloud over his head all the time, saying that nothing he tried had any chance of succeeding. It could be a job he wasn’t chosen for, the desert in love lifethe constant losses in the race against the boletos…

Paulo had a characteristic common to many who cultivate this self-image: he placed the blame on congenital bad luck and quoted a verse by bluesman Albert King, which says “If it wasn’t for bad luck / You know I wouldn’t have no luck at all” (“If it wasn’t for bad luck / You know I wouldn’t have any luck”). He was convinced that he was a puppet of destiny traced by a metaphysical force contrary to him.

failure collectors

So he just stopped trying. He stopped making work contacts, he no longer saw his friends (I was an exception, even though our dates had become leap years)… In love, then, he became celibate. After all, who would get involved with a “failure collector” like him?

I speak of my late friend in the past because he died in 2020, from the consequences of a serious heart attack. Too soon, she was still in her 40s. In a way, I felt like I failed him too. I was never able to help him get rid of this fixed idea of ​​being “born to lose”. If that was indeed possible.

Not that it was a simple task. According to Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, these negative feelings about oneself take over the personality. “Allowing yourself to be dragged down by failure creates a huge sense of ‘I’. ‘I’ as a monolithic solid rather than a fluid, dynamic, changing process. It gets carved in stone that ‘I’m bad, I’m a failure’, and then you’re kind of addicted to the sinking feeling of self-pity and guilt and shame.”

fail better

This American nun, who has a compilation of her thoughts on the subject in the book Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better (Global Editora), teaches us that, of course, in many moments of life we ​​will not be able to reach our goals. but that we should reflect on these failures as a natural part of existence. And that will pass.

Practice accepting the undesirable

Pema Chödrön reveals that, in order to get back on our feet after a fiasco, we need to practice embracing the undesirable. That way we keep what she calls the “crudeness of vulnerability” in our hearts. One of the synonyms of “vulnerable” is precisely “defeated”. Accepting eventual failure, or even a series of them in a more difficult period of life, will, as Pema explains, make us “fail better”.

And that means having the psychological conditions to deal with that feeling instead of pushing it under the rug – or, worse, internalizing it as inseparable from our essence. While this vulnerability is raw, it is easier to combine it with all other aspects of our personality – including those that fill us with pride – without it prevailing.

overcoming failure

And one of the ways to live better with failure is to try to understand the reasons why something didn’t work out. Because believe me, it’s not a God who doesn’t like you or a case of chronic bad luck. If a job did not materialize, it may be that your professional history was not the most favorable for that vacancy. And it may also be that there is still a chance to reverse this situation. If you really want this job, you can seek better preparation, invest in courses that will give you the skills the employer wants…

Love can end. and that’s okay

What about a relationship that ended? First of all, it is worth reflecting: was this ending really a failure? An exercise in self-knowledge helps a lot to redefine what happened. If the separation was natural consequence from a life together in which there was no more romance, intimacy and mutual admiration, taking new paths tends to be more of a success than a mistake. Failure would be pushing with the belly a relationship permeated by indifference.

And therein lies one of the great opportunities to rethink the conventional perspective of failure. For our grandparents, a divorce in the family was a shame, a weakness (perhaps of both parties involved). It was deviating from the standard that society expected of you. A pattern that kept couples unhappy for convenience. Listening more to your inner voice can be a reunion with the possibility of being loved – by a person without eyes blurred by disenchantment or the wear and tear of living together.

Other ways to show love

Idealizing the other less or what to expect from a relationship also changes our perspective of failure. Does your partner not know how to nail a picture to the wall? How about focusing on how good he is in the kitchen or taking care of the kids? Is your partner not one to verbalize how she feels about you? As marriage counselor Gary Chapman, author of the bestseller The 5 Love Languageswords of affirmation aren’t the only way someone can show affection.

This can happen through physical touches throughout the day (a caress or spontaneous hug), by dedicating quality time to you (like turning off your cell phone at a restaurant to fully focus on the date), by gifts (other than price, but for the symbolism they have) and for acts of service (the person who offers you a massage, who takes good care of the plants you bought, who prepares a romantic dinner without the date being necessarily special).

Learn to resignify failure

That is, understanding the roots of what you consider a failure is also the chance to resignify it. Or using that feeling to build something new and positive. “Sometimes you can take vulnerability and turn it into creative poetry, writing, dancing, music… Artists have been doing this since the beginning of time”, teaches nun Pema Chödrön.

One artist who has shaped his creative universe around the idea of ​​failure is Allan Sieber. Designer who already had a fixed space at Folha de S. Paulo and today he is a frequent contributor to the magazine PiauíSieber has an art called A Cat Named Failure. The cat drawn, with a sad expression, says he has seven lives, but they are all bad.

Another destination for failures

Today, Allan Sieber’s biggest source of income is a newsletter called My dear Diary, in which he tells, without any filter, the small and big defeats of his day to day. It could be the time his apartment got flooded, the insufferable neighbors, or problems with a paycheck he was supposed to get. Everything is a theme for his work.

“Writing about failure has become therapy for me. I live in Rio de Janeiro, but my best friends are in the South or in São Paulo. So, not having anyone to talk to, I made up the thing about complaining about life in this diary. And that helps me a lot psychologically,” she says.

According to him, the fact that since childhood, having dealt with many situations that didn’t turn out the way he expected, got him used to expecting the worst and knowing how to deal with it. “I became a more stoic person. To bring me down it has to be a very serious tragedy.”

What is failure?

And yet, the designer questions people’s notion of failure. “I don’t believe, for example, in this capitalist view that not having managed to accumulate money and goods is a failure”, he says.

Allan knows that you don’t have to be rich to remove the stigma of failure from your soul. “I have my bills up to date, I’m a single father, but I see my son all the time, I live off my art, a very rare thing in Brazil… So, in a way, I even consider myself a winner.”

life will go on

Failure is the raw material of Allan Sieber’s art, but it does not define it. Our setbacks will alternate with conquests and periods when little good or very bad happens. Assuming that no one is this always glorious, and false, image that we see on people’s Instagram is a way of improve self-perception. So we develop a more balanced perspective on our capabilities – and also on what will not work anyway. And life will go on anyway. Maybe even better than before.

by Alex Martins

It fails when the situation requires manual skills, such as changing the shower head. But he doesn’t feel his world collapsing because of it.

Published by Vida Simples magazine