By Lara Carballo, Postgraduate Researcher at IFTC.
Aged 6 I left England to live in Trinidad. A year or so later, our class was asked to write a story entitled “My First Trip Abroad”; and I proceeded to do just that. I discussed my first time on a plane, the new smells and temperatures that I became aware of as I landed, the first drive to what was to be my new home.
I loved writing stories, and felt that I had done a pretty good job. When my masterpiece was returned to me, I was devastated to receive a low grade with comments from the teacher explaining that I had not fulfilled the brief. What she had actually meant was for us to describe our first trip away from Trinidad. I felt, in the short term that I had indeed failed.
Upon reflection however, even at that young age, I realised that this failure had come about for a reason. I had lacked important information regarding the requirements of this task – the brief had been unclear. With this in mind I was able to avoid any detriment to my self-esteem as I was able to extract myself from the situation that had led to these circumstances.
This was explained at a workshop that I was fortunate enough to be able to attend at the Courage Festival at the University of East Anglia earlier this year. Led by Benjamin Marshall, this session was entitled “Responding to Failure and Setbacks – A wellbeing perspective”. Among other things Ben explained that when failure occurs, our mind-set can lead us to automatically feel ourselves as being a failure, when the true fact may actually be that we simply are experiencing failure because of imperfect circumstances.
The session defined failure as being “an inability to meet expectations in a particular area, and achieve a desired goal”. It went on to explain that as people we have an underlying tendency to assume that we have an inaccurately high perception of our control and responsibility over events that we encounter. This may lead to higher than reasonable levels of guilt and self-blame when things go wrong.
Depending on our personalities, these imperfect moments can begin to erode our self-esteem, and alter our identities. We potentially come to see ourselves as “someone who fails”. However, if we can remove this level of self-blame, and look towards the elements of the situation that led to unmet goals and expectations, we can begin to manage our response to this perceived failure. We can begin to examine the elements that may need to be altered in order to allow for those goals to be met. We can indeed learn from the experience.
Going back to my opening example, I learnt at that young age that people write briefs from different perspectives. It taught me to examine the requirements and context before writing. The feeling of being a failure was short-lived, and I added what I learnt from that situation to an ever-expanding tool box, and continued to enjoy writing stories.
Lara Carballo, PGR at the Institute for Future Transport and Cities.
Lara’s Twitter: @LaraTC1