Emotional Sandwiches
Page 16
Failure may carry a negative connotation (if you want to perceive failure as negative), but the way you react does not have to mirror that darker side. Failure can give rise to a positive experience that can even protect. How many times have you attempted to do something that failed and afterwards you were inclined to agree that had it worked out you may not be on the right path or doing something you truly aspired to do. You end up thanking Failure for getting in the way and so the outcome was rather positive! The act of failure itself is considered negative; upon reflection the result of failure can go on to have a positive impact in your life. Isn’t this exciting to know?!
When Failure is looked upon as a disease, then naturally we are going to want to avoid being in its presence. We will try our utmost to avoid failing and we may even avoid doing things that could lead to disappointment and give rise to failure. This will be closely linked to Risk and if we don’t want to leave ourselves wide open to the possibility of meeting up with Failure, we may not take a risk. We may choose differently because one option is less achievable than another and we don’t want to consider failure as an option. We avoid Failure as best we can and in doing so we may miss out on opportunities and adventures. We don’t know that we will go on to fail. We are setting ourselves limitations so that we don’t have to experience the emotions that accompany Failure. If we learn to accept that failure doesn’t have to equate to the end of the world or a life-threatening disease and that failure may be a learning curve that will stop us walking in a straight line forever, then we could enjoy the detours.
During these evaluations the elders were trying to keep up with the ambiguity that their appointed alien down on earth was uncovering. They could see how Failure was something to be avoided but felt saddened by the fact that Failure wasn’t, in one form or another, going to be avoidable and humans were desperately going out of their way to find reasons it could be. Excuses surfaced when failure was experienced, but they were not entirely understood. Whilst an excuse was also a justification, it didn’t mean it was misplaced. The excuses seemed to be coloured with Fear, Guilt and Need. All of these limiting emotions kept the impact of failure in a negative place and stopped its own emotions from moving on; instead failure was becoming a sole reason not to try something again.
Confidence was surrounding it, hoping that Failure would stop replaying the scene of the crime over and over but it was up to the human to pick itself back up, take the negative and positive feedback, and choose wisdom over disease. Negativity eats away at the weaknesses. Failure is only a weakness if you choose to let it be your weakness. Have you actually stopped to think about the positive sides to Failure? So adopting the idea that failure is an acceptable part of life, why do we tend to beat around the bush and call it all the names under the sun when it occurs?
The alien made a few bullet points, to summarise how three words in particular were able to influence Failure to feel less than adequate, but if people understood what Fear, Guilt and Need meant to them – in relation to their own shortcomings – then maybe they would stop bullying Failure and be more empathetic.
Failure tends to get emotional; the following contains three extracts taken from the notes made by the alien during its observations:
Fear
Humans have a tendency to fear Failure. When they fail they feel as if they have let themselves or other people down and fear how people may react. They fear the consequences of their failure. Different levels of failure exist and the lack of success can be detrimental to a lifeform. Fear supports avoidance; when a human fears that failure will result, they may avoid an action altogether. Fear of failure can be triggered by past experiences and negative encounters with other humans, or a previous act of failure can inhibit their confidence to try again. Fear can hold a human back in their quest to live a happier life, placing limitations on their own abilities, and these insecurities can be transmitted onto another human.
Guilt
When a human fails to achieve a goal they can either feel guilty or be influenced by another person to feel guilt. Humans create their own emotions and cannot be given these by another person. However, humans tend to display emotions easily and when they fail they usually exhibit guilt in one form or another. This may pass quickly as humans are a supportive lifeform having found that different methods can be used to help someone deal with any guilt associated with failure. Some humans have poor communication skills and have not learned how to vocalise their thoughts and feelings. The younger generation would benefit from understanding that failure is an acceptable part of life but the mature lifeform has a duty of care to prepare them for failure in case it happens. This has become a bespoke practice and may require a sensitive approach because all lifeforms have different personality traits. Therefore each act of failure should be addressed on a case-by-case basis.
Need
Humans often identify a need to do something before they can complete another task. If they fail in their quest and become unsuccessful they can exhibit signs of distress which accompany failure because expectations have not been met. Human cultures vary across the planet and use a form of assessment that defines failure or success. If humans need to pass a test in order to practise a profession, then Failure could intercept and stop them from proceeding until they resit the test and finally pass. Sometimes the need to pass an assessment is not a necessity. When humans experience failure, some are more able to accept that it was not meant to be (it wasn’t their calling). Rather than limit their own thought patterns, they often demonstrate the ability to move on to another project. A healthy approach to failure may still involve using excuses but these are more on a par with reasons.
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Deferred success is real. Success is often deferred until Failure gets its act together and stops wasting your time. I am happy to hear people say, “It isn’t failure, it is only deferred success”, as long as they are not hiding behind Failure and treating it like it didn’t exist. Failure can exist and it can still be deferred success; it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Failure, in this instance, may have existed to simply slow down the journey that will finally stop at the station of success.
Sometimes we board a slow train that costs less but takes a little bit longer. It seems at the time to stop at every location along the line, but it doesn’t really. It stops occasionally so you can reflect and remind yourself that places do exist in between. Whilst the final destination has been planned all along – and will be reached if it is meant to be reached – the momentary lapses of reasons are just that. They are moments that have taken a tea break and switched the radio on to drown out your impatience. If you don’t appreciate the journey then you can be slowed down, one way or another. This may not happen every time, hence the enviousness that you experience when you witness someone else getting to their destination faster, but (and I don’t know why) we all get different lessons thrown at us. Maybe we are supposed to see something that we wouldn’t otherwise see if we got on the fast train. We should treat Failure as a gift or in the very least consider why it has come into our lives.
Why do we have to pretend Failure doesn’t exist? Who are we protecting and what is the reason? Why can’t we let people use the experience as an opportunity to learn or is it the additional emotional mess that accompanies Failure that will take up more of our energy and only require more from Patience and Time? If we mollycoddle everyone – adults or children – then how do we create a society that is open to having honest conversations about their feelings which will enable them to respect Failure and not see it as an enemy every time it appears? If we wrap it up in shiny paper and throw it around in a game of Pass the Parcel, the problem is that no matter how shiny the paper, once it is opened, the truth still reveals itself. Good Judgement and PJ will still be waiting. If you have failed, PJ may let you know how it misjudged the situation (probably apologising profusely) and Good Judgement may be on hand to help you get back on track.
It is also about being sensitive to the fact that Failure can knock your confidence and thrive on your trust issues. You can feel like the bottom of your world has fallen through. What if the fear of trying again is an emotion that will paralyse your thoughts? The notion that you will feel guilty, should you try again and subsequently fail, will result in Need running around like a headless chicken because it doesn’t differentiate between a desire and a necessity.
There is a time and place to protect people by being economical with the truth. Even children don’t want to be lied to but they are clever little beings and will respond well if you coat Failure in a dab of sugar, wave a wand and turn it into a deferred success. Sugar coating the truth once in a while will help anyone to manage their reactions when Failure pays a visit – even adults, who are just big kids too!
It was becoming obvious to the alien visitor that there was a strong movement beginning to form and although the word failure had a literal meaning in the human dictionary it was becoming a cause for contention among ‘The People’. The alien could not be certain whether this was as a result of the planet becoming overly sensitive and less able to deal with conflict. It noticed that there was a motto in circulation that encouraged people to challenge and not collude, but it wondered if humans were less able to put this theory into practice. Were they still at a stage in their human lifecycle that was far better at coming up with ideas than implementing them? They react too quickly and don’t always put a negative outcome into perspective; when one thing doesn’t work, they tend to change the whole system. When something doesn’t work for one person they go about meeting the needs of that person at the expense of upsetting an entire community.
The alien came to the conclusion that there wasn’t enough time on this particular mission to analyse what failure individually meant to the humans and the word wasn’t as straightforward to interpret as it had initially imagined. The elders on its own planet had banned rose-tinted glasses when they realised that excuses were interfering with the learning and development stages of their own kind. They didn’t condone bullying and ruled this out many light years ago, but advocated that all lifeforms on their planet aspire to taking ownership of their actions and feelings.
If failure is truly success turned inside out, then you could live with the idea that failure isn’t the end but a turning point in your life. Success doesn’t necessarily sit at the opposite end to failure. What you consider has been a complete failure in one aspect of your life will give rise to a new adventure that will bring with it an opportunity for success to transpire in a different area altogether.
As the alien boarded its spacecraft it turned around to offer a final piece of advice to the human race. Coming from ‘one who knows’, it said, “Make your own life fit for purpose because if the skies have no limits then why should you?!”
F*E*A*R
The Holiday Complex
If you had an opportunity to jump out of an aeroplane would you fear the fall or fear the landing? Would the end result be your biggest concern or is it what could happen on the way down? In a split second, adrenaline could pull you out of the aeroplane freezing Fear’s assets long enough to allow you to free fall and taste emotional freedom. Alternatively, Fear can keep you in your seat as you tell the pilot it is just a little setback and you will find the courage to jump, but it is just a matter of time.
As we know, Time will just follow you around but it won’t make anything in particular happen for you all by itself. When you attempt to do a parachute jump for a charity, with the view to conquering your fear of heights on the way down, it isn’t Time that will take any credit. Quite often, the more time you have to think about doing something Fear will simply spend that time talking you out of it.
Talking yourself into feeling fearful and talking yourself back out of this unpleasant emotional state is a practice that comes more easily to some of us. We allocate Fear extra playing time, like a football game that has resulted in a tie during a cup match; the ball has been kicked back and forth consecutively and up until now has presented no winner. Fear wins you over when you give up, watching the ball roll into the net because your own goalkeeper got bored and took off. Maybe you could give up playing emotional games that waste your time and consider inviting Fear out for a friendly drink after the next game and find out where it gets its energy from!
Think of a couple of your own experiences that keep you on the edge of making a decision because Fear cannot make up its mind if it wants to be involved. Perhaps you have got used to Fear being present when you have to make a choice. Tune into your gut instincts and ask yourself if you are worrying over the end result or have an aversion to climbing the steps that will lead you there. Do you fear taking the first step and this is why you don’t even tie your shoe laces and get past the front door?!
When fear sets in, overcoming the first hurdle will distort your eyesight and you will convince yourself that a mountain ahead is blocking your vision. If the first step posed no problem and you did in fact manage to push your way through the front door without Fear seeing you, then hopefully all sense of fear will be lost completely as you journey on. However, if it shows up again having found a shortcut and met you later down the path just to test your patience, then it can influence you to stop in your tracks or turn back.
Now you could lead yourself to believe that Fear is a little bully and its only intention is to frighten you into submission. I am not quite sure this is the entire story. Fear is not dissimilar to many of your emotions that have a naughty side; it tends to have a history and there could be a reason that it keeps showing up. It mingles with Darkness and you could approach it in much the same way when you come into contact. Fear can also protect you, playing devil’s advocate, as it thinks it is helping you before you take action so you can weigh up the pros and cons.
Unfortunately, Fear can go too far and you end up thinking that Fear is stopping you intentionally from doing something. Fear is reactive and doesn’t stop you without your help – you allow Fear to stop you. You may not believe this when you are in the throes of having an anxiety attack because a black hairy spider has crossed your path. If you did ‘stop’ to ask yourself why you allow Fear to interfere, just when you thought the way ahead was clear of emotional attachment, you may find that there are plenty of reasons competing for your attention.
The eight-legged creature which stopped you from walking down the stairs, because it perched halfway along the ceiling minding its own business, is usually blamed for arousing a wave of fear throughout your body. I am not an expert on understanding the cause and effect of phobias but I know that I can be affected by this sort of scenario. How do I manage my reactions? I don’t look; I scurry past and try not to make eye contact and then grab the nearest nebuliser to bring myself back to a sense of reality! Maybe I should look Fear directly in the eyes but at the time it isn’t easy to be rational as Fear gives rise to emotions.
I personally don’t recall if a childhood experience influenced me at some stage to feel as though someone had flicked my kneecaps to one side leaving my jelly legs to wobble in fear of a spider attack. I just believe that even if we don’t know how a fear came to surface we have a duty of care to ourselves to work out how we overcome it, if it is causing us emotional pain. I remember when I was on a campsite in America, there were so many spiders that I got used to having them around so Fear toddled off and left my kneecaps alone. Equally, the idea of putting ourselves in a perceived form of danger – jus
t to overcome a fear – isn’t logical to me either. I would have to find a compelling reason to conquer a fear. If I didn’t, then I am not going to get on a rollercoaster that will end up inviting half a dozen other emotions to climb aboard at my expense. I have always wanted to visit the Amazon and I admit that this idea has been squashed because plate-sized arachnids exist in its forests and apparently jump around. If I decide that my desire to visit the Amazon turns into a necessity and becomes one of my top ten things to do before I die, then I will seek to overturn my fear and post the experience on whatever the latest social network site happens to be at the time. I am sure it takes practice to conquer a fear but then it could be like hiccups – all of a sudden they are gone!
Imagine you are struggling to jump out of the aeroplane for the first time. Practice isn’t going to be an option. You are planning to raise money because you haven’t done it before – and not because you were ever part of the Parachute Regiment! Maybe your jump will be more lucrative in the long run with Fear strapped to your back as you descend, all because the charity working to save lives will appreciate your vulnerability and courage! So Fear is not all bad and can in fact get us to do the things we may never have dreamt of doing – but the part you play in this instance will be to remind yourself of the invaluable end goal. This is what will help you overcome your fear on the way down (you won’t have much time to analyse the landing – until later). Look at it another way: your fear has been bought off you for a worthwhile cause. Donations are literally falling out of the sky!