Feel Like A Failure? It's A Journey
A touch of reality to our perceived inferiority.
“When we get caught in self-criticism and shame, we feel inadequate, defective and inferior. When we feel that way we want to hide, get smaller, disappear. It produces urges to escape and avoid, rather than to dust ourselves off and try again.”
If you’re reading the quote above and feeling suddenly exposed because someone has read you more clearly than you read yourself or discovered your hidden vice of self-critique, you’re not alone. I’m the same and I felt exactly the same way while reading this passage from “Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?” by Dr Julie Smith.
Other than Atomic Habits, this is one of the few self-help books I’d recommend vociferously and wholeheartedly having only read through less than half of it.
Much has been said and written about self-criticism and how the antidote to it is to be self-compassionate and kind to yourself. This is easier said than done because we carry a lot of baggage that’s incredibly difficult, nay, impossible to simply drop and walk away from.
Said baggage requires a whole load of unpacking where you have to unzip every compartment and pocket, remove every single item, and ensure nothing is left so you can view the smallest details of your emotional and mental burdens laid out in front of you to scrutinise, discard or accept with complete confidence and certainty. Whatever is left is who you are. It’s a journey that ends in satisfaction and ultimately, contentment with how things have turned out.
Overcoming self-critique is difficult and one of the hardest tasks. Where it stems from varies from person to person, whether it’s from years of trauma, or a need to achieve unattainable perfection that leads to paralysis in action due to years of comparison and self-criticism.
Kirsten Powers’ piece about Resistance speaks of this self-critique that refuses to let us move forward and prevents us from progressing towards our goals. While the main gist of the article is about the main force that blocks creativity, the nitty-gritty of it drills into how we speak to ourselves and how little respect we offer our self—worth. Who needs a bully when you have yourself to beat you down and blame you for your own failures?
Combating the bully may seem an insurmountable task. After all, how do you tell yourself to go away? It’s not as simple as telling ourselves “no” and getting up to do something else.
But while writing this, it suddenly came to me.
Every time you don’t achieve what you set out to do, view the result as just another task to complete. Take the value judgement out of it and remove any attachment to your self-worth. What would be the worst outcome if you don’t do it? Giving the task importance doesn’t mean it’s attached to your sense of self and identity.
Not completing a job you gave yourself as part of a goal you’re trying to accomplish doesn’t warrant a diatribe on which you tell yourself that “it wasn’t worth doing anyway because you’re not good enough and will always be that way.”
Sounds a lot like the cold feet Chandler Bing had on his wedding day and his fear of failing marriage.
The problem with attaching your goal to your self-worth is that there’s no end to picking at it. You could complete that task and achieve your goal but then what next? It felt too easy therefore you didn’t try hard enough and so you can’t be successful? The slippery slope here is that if the goal is achievable, you’ll always wonder whether it’s because you didn’t work hard enough for it. Funnily enough, it’s probably because it wasn’t that insurmountable in the first place.
On the other hand, if it’s too hard and forces you to go out of your comfort zone, which is a struggle for the best of us, the difficulty of it drags you down into the bullying self-talk.
Can you see the problem here?
Meeting our goals and maintaining our focus is simply a case of trying again. The self-compassion we need is to keep practicing and give ourselves some leniency and space to mess up when we do.
It’s not just about perseverance or not giving up but traversing through the internal critic - our own bully - and coming out of it on the other side as someone who can see the truth. That we’re worthy of being spoken to with respect, regardless of whether we achieve our goals or not.
Overcoming our feelings of inadequacy isn’t an easy thing to do. It’s going take mindful thought followed by conscious action to avoid falling into the traps of our bully ready and waiting to berate us. It’s not merely self-compassion you need but also an objective eye that looks at the bigger picture of your efforts compared to looking at the finer details of the job at hand that you weren’t able to fulfil.
More often than not, the bigger picture is this: failing to complete a task doesn’t mean you’ve failed altogether, that you should give up and that you don’t even deserve what you’re trying to achieve.
It could mean that you need to return to it from a different angle or a unique approach. It might mean you need to study the topic using a different technique, that jogging will be better than running, that your baby needs to be held in the rugby ball hold rather than on the shoulder, or that you need to think harder about an issue before you write about it.
The journey of doing this is what will make you more confident in your abilities. I’d even advise you write these moments of learning from the journey down somewhere in a notebook or journal so you have evidence against your bully before they start talking about your shortcomings.
Learning how to deal with your feelings of failure is an ongoing process. It takes practice and if there’s anything you should take away from this piece, it’s this adage coined by Robert the Bruce:
"If at first you don't succeed try, try and try again.”
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