Perfect Failure
Last night, I was watching a group of highly trained perfectionists compete on the world’s largest stage. The Olympics. Not a single loser there. Am I right? Brene’ Brown talked about going to the national TED conference one year and realizing each person she met had a story like, “yeah I wanted to go to medical school, but I couldn’t get in because my MCAT scores were too low.” Then she looked at their name badge and it said the COO of Google Apps. They probably turned out ok. She realized TED was really a failure conference. Everyone there had failed at something, and that failure led to a different place, where they went on to be wildly successful. Even if that success was not the original plan.
Back to the Olympics. I could not help but notice these were games of perfection. Measured and evaluated to the smallest degree possible. Like the Monobob “loser” who was two-tenths of a second behind the winner. Did you catch that? Two-tenths of ONE second. How can you define yourself as a loser on such a miniscule scale? And the announcers were saying things like, “oh, she was waaayyyy off the mark.” Again, sitting there in my living room watching this play out I kept wondering if I am the only person thinking, “wait, what?” She just lost in the amount of time it takes to do...well, nothing. I can’t think of anything I can do in two-tenths of a second. Can you? Or the figure skater who did not quite finish that rotation on the triple Lutz and had a hand down on the ice. DEDUCTION! At least one point. You see, we are only accepting absolutely, solidly, with no exceptions… PERFECT.
These are the best athletes in the world. Competing on the largest stage. But that one bobble, that one slightly off sled turn in corner four, or the knee touch in the men’s slopestyle were all deductions. And deductions do not get you Gold. Only the absence of deductions, and a flawless performance will get you the tallest position on the podium.
What is this relationship we have with winning and failing? If you are like me, you intellectually embrace failure as a natural and necessary part of learning anything new. Lionel Ritchey said, while judging American Idol, “when you win, you win, and when you lose, you learn.” But does this apply to everything? Applying this in real life, in real time, is a much different exercise than intellectualizing it. I agree with Lionel Ritchey, but I don’t know if I’m very good at “living” with failure. Most of us are given very mixed messages about failure. On one hand we are told it’s ok to fail. Then we are told to fail but do it fast. Ok, that means what exactly? Pick your bum up off the ice and get back in step with the music quickly? Then the message was to fail forward, that was suddenly the buzz word du jour. Meaning, I suppose, that it was ok to fail as long as you could prove you made something great out of it.
Whatever happened to just try and fail, and nothing? Just the process itself. Is that even allowable anymore? Watching the Olympics, it seems to me that the athletes that get to that level have been given the message that if they fail, they had better make it count. I am left with a question about this messaging. Here is where you may really disagree with me. In fact, I might actually disagree with myself, so it’s perfectly fine if you do. What if all the adversity to failure is producing unrealistic expectations for how a person should “be” in the world? What happens to the athlete when they go on to do, well anything else, and they don’t get it perfectly right the first time, or the one-hundredth time? Will this person see themselves through the lens of failure for the rest of their life?
What happens if failure becomes a non-option for someone?
When failure becomes a non-option, I propose this is where suffering comes in. Why? If I do everything in my power to not fail, and I over-prepare, and I sacrifice everything, give up living another kind of life, and then still fail, how could I not suffer? This kind of driven thinking leaves little to no room for creativity, experimentation, spontaneity, and the “F” word- FUN. When we are turned on high all the time, always thinking about winning, about that two-tenths of a second, we don’t allow ourselves to completely discharge all that energy that gets generated to perform at peak levels.
If you can’t tell, I just made the transition from the Olympics to my own life. Maybe your life too? We get so wrapped up in something and so focused on winning, that we become like these Olympic level athletes where we stay “on high alert” all the time, never allowing ourselves to fully discharge our emotional arousal. And this builds and builds over time. And eventually burns us out. We then turn to yoga three days a week, or 10 minutes a day of mindfulness practice using an App (thanks Mr. App COO for not going to medical school). If you are like me, you buy several books on “how to…” fill in the blank. You watch YouTube videos, listen to Podcasts, attend webinars, and go to training. All with the goal of figuring out how you could be a winner and not turn into a crispy noodle at the same time.
Then one day we realize we cannot keep the pace up any longer. We were never really going back to ground level after each episode of emotional arousal. Be it from a three-hour board meeting, or an argument with a colleague, or dealing with a frustrated client demanding change. The stimulus does not really matter, and besides the amount of stress we feel is not dependent on the stimulus itself, but rather our response to the stimulus. It’s the fact we had 50 different stimuli in a single day, each with varying levels of upset. And of those 50 stimuli, we only fully recovered from 35 of them. The remaining 15 got carried over, and unlike our bank account, this is not a good thing.
Meet Allostatic Load. Yep, a fancy word that basically means we don’t fully recover, or go back to stasis, after we encounter something that triggers us. Again, one or two of these over the course of a week, may not be a big deal. But too many of them over time, can be a huge deal. And if any of those triggers are HUGE for us individually, that will also be a big deal. The question becomes…
HOW DO WE RECOVER?
This was the question on my mind while watching the athletes. BUT I was wondering how the WINNERS would recover, not just the “losers.” How will those brilliant and talented athletes return and handle their individual loads? It’s also the coaches, the parents, spouses and partners, extended family, and community members who supported them. How will everyone go from the top of the mountain back to day to day living, carrying that enormous load with them?
I know of only one path to reduce Allostatic Load. And it’s not just doing yoga (although yoga is great and does a lot of cool things for us), and it’s not just listening to an App or reading a book about decreasing allostatic load. Although these can also be helpful resources. It comes down to practices that allow us to fully discharge after an emotionally triggering event, or series of events. Awareness of our emotional arousal, tuning into the stress response, grounding ourselves and allowing our nervous system to “reset” is the path to untangling. This practice of grounding and releasing could take a while. And I intentionally use the word “practice” because it’s not just awareness, or insight that gets us there. It takes a practice of discharge over time to see a real difference.
I have hope for the athletes because practice is second nature for them. For the rest of us, we may have to learn how to take up a practice again. We may be out of practice for practice, pun intended. Going back to something I said a bit earlier though. It’s really not the stressful event in and of itself that causes us to build allostatic load (sometimes though, the stressor itself is big enough to build load, regardless of our reaction to it). Have you noticed that some people seem to move on more quickly after a stressful event than others? This has to do with their “load” going into the event, and their perception of it. There are other reasons as well, but for the sake of simplicity let’s just say it comes down to how wide our tolerance is before the event, how much load we are carrying, and our perception of what triggered us.
Making room for stress requires a certain amount of cleaning out our stress closets first. By the way, my dog is excellent at this. Did you know that most animals do not build allostatic load? My golden retriever, on a walk, will encounter another dog and have a real bark-fest, then once we move on, he goes about ten steps, stops, and shakes from head to tail. DISCHARGE. He does not build allostatic load. In fact, I know he hasn’t built allostatic load because he is always ready to re-engage when we meet another dog. Bark, walk 10 feet, shake from head to toe. Anxiety Arousal + Reaction + Shake it Off /Ground = Discharge.
But I bet he can’t land a triple Lutz in competition. So maybe that’s why he doesn’t build too much allostatic load. Hmmm.
