Am I a failure? What is failure anyway?

What is failure? One thing I like to be clear about is that people aren’t failures. People fail at tasks, people make mistakes, but they themselves are not failures. Sometimes you just don’t have a particular skill yet. Failure is part and parcel of life. All in all, there’s more failure about than success, it’s just that people don’t tend to advertise it. It would be good if they did. Many people become afraid of failure and then miss out or avoid opportunities. If you do fail or mess up, many times people use this as a way to shatter their self belief. Your idea of failure might be different to someone else’s, so we may suffer acutely from pressure driven by ourselves or others to achieve without hiccups along the way. Fortunately, if you change the way you look at failure, then you can change the way you approach the prospect of messing up, making a mistake or not meeting a personal goal and your feelings of failure can change.

My own point of view is that normalising failure would stop people from comparing their insides to other people’s outsides. Daily, we see images of other people’s success and it appears instagram-effortless. With social media and 24 hour news, we have instant access to a world of others to whom we are invited to compare ourselves, so we will always be able to find someone who appears ‘more successful’ than us. This is highly threatening to our brain, our sense of who we are and where we fit in socially. Our brains’ threat systems have not developed the capacity to keep pace with the modern world and this bottomless pool of others. Our brains may have developed well enough to deal with social comparison in smaller social groups in our evolutionary past as hunter gatherers; this was probably in many ways adaptive and kept us on our toes. Today such large scale social comparison in terms of failure or success is probably unhelpful.

Success is given a good press but many times we don’t get to see the struggle involved behind the scenes. The truth is, success is not always what it seems…

One exceptional quote comes from basketball player Michael Jordan:

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games, 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game’s winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

You will notice that Mr Jordan is open about his failures and you could notice that he does not label himself a failure. He only defines his actions. This is important. If he were to rate and label himself as a failure this would impact on his confidence and sense of self worth, and this would make it very hard for him to dust himself down from inevitable and frequent failures. This same attitude can help whether you are just making your way through life, or whether you are learning a new skill at work or for leisure, or trying to make progress in therapy.

To fail at something is part of being a living and growing human being. Think of babies…. if a baby cared too much about failure, they’d never learn to crawl or walk. Think of all the effort, the hard work and the tears required for a baby to get up and moving about. There were many failed attempts before the glorious moment they finally found freedom walking on their own for the first time. Their skill (or success) is the result of many failed attempts with a lot of support and encouragement from caregivers along the way. Failure is part of life and ideally not something to avoid or fear.

In order to experience some success or progress, failure is to expected. Failing is part of learning. No-one is born with talent. Even the most ‘gifted’ person you know did not get up one morning and succeed at what they do… chances are they spend many hours messing up, trying and keeping going. There will have been moments of disappointment, frustration, sadness, joy, all the emotions along the way. The application of effort and ability to tolerate the discomfort of failure is key to picking yourself up again, dusting yourself off and standing tall once more. If you berate yourself as a failure when you fail, your confidence will be shattered. Better to accept that you’re a human being and that while you may fail at things along the way, many of which you have limited to no control over, this has no bearing on your worth as a person.

You are not a failure.

The philosophy behind REBT CBT is that you are much more than the sum total of your actions, thoughts and feelings. You are too complex and unique to be summed up with a mere description or label. Human language in the form of labels is just not enough to capture what it is to be human. We are much more than the sum of our parts. All humans are capable of change, and our skills and attributes are ripe for development if we want to change them. We have changed, we will change and will never from moment to moment be the same, so we can never be captured with a single word. To label yourself a ‘failure’ is an unfounded and inaccurate judgment. It’s easy to label yourself (or another) as a failure, but it’s unfair and overly critical, overlooking all your potential and your past.

As a CBT therapist, I want to help you to adopt a new belief about yourself - that all humans are born of equal worth, albeit sometimes into circumstances and a time that may not have been their choice. The only true things you can say about humans are that each is fallible (prone to making mistakes), imperfect, unique, complex and worthwhile. No person is a total failure, no person is perfect or a complete success, nor is it even possible to describe a person as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

If you want a vivid example of this, I have recently been reflecting on the example of the man who intervened in a terror attack in London and helped to distract and chase the attacker to a location where he was unable to cause further harm. He was claimed a hero. It was later discovered that this same man was on release from prison, having previously committed a murder. So, what is this person? Is he a hero? Or is he totally evil, capable of the worst crime? If we look at it truthfully, he is neither a hero nor is he evil. He’s just a human being, who has on the one hand carried out a heroic act, but he has also committed what most people would consider a terrible crime. When you look at it this way, he’s neither good or bad, though his actions have the potential to be good or bad.

The helpful philosophy of refusing to rate yourself but stay focused on your actions will free you up to do what matters to you. No amount of self-berating when you don’t achieve your goals will help you unless you want to damage your confidence and increase your anxiety. Accept yourself as a fallible human being.

If we can begin to adopt a more balanced and genuinely realistic attitude towards ourselves, then we can accept ourselves for our failings and our mistakes along the way, without shattering any hard-won confidence. We can honestly and fairly rate our actions and accept or improve our skills. But no need to berate ourselves for failures, gentle encouragement and self acceptance will work wonders.

Feel free to keep failing forwards towards your goals and your successes.

Ali Binns is a CBT therapist based in Bath. She works as an integrative CBT therapist using techniques drawn from cognitive behavioural therapies such as REBT, CT, ACT and Compassion Focused Therapy.

Self acceptance or self esteem?

Would you chop down an orchard if you found one apple that wasn’t perfect? That’s what we do to ourselves when we don’t live up to our own rules about who we think we ought to be or how we should be. When you’re struggling in life, you may find yourself wishing you had ‘better self esteem’ or that you could be more confident. The real answer to this question is not to cut yourself down or pretend that everything is great, but to develop what we call self acceptance in CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) and REBT (rational emotive behavioural therapy).

Depending on where you are at, the idea of self acceptance can range anywhere from being something that eludes you from time to time, or may at another end of the scale even seem incomprehensible. People often come to therapy with the goal of raising their self esteem. I’ve written this article as it can be tricky to explain that seeking self esteem is not one and the same. I hope to explain why self esteem may not be all it’s cracked up to be, and why self acceptance through a practice of self compassion thinking and acting is a preferable way forward.

What is self esteem?

For many years, self esteem was seen as the positive way to boost feelings of confidence and wellbeing. However, researchers have found there are downsides to the pursuit of self esteem. Self esteem literally means ‘rating the self’. How do we rate the self? Well, naturally, we can and do rate ourselves positively or negatively depending on any given situation. But there are problems with this. When we rate ourselves, we subject ourselves to volatile fluctuations by basing our worth on the back of how well we have achieved or not. What happens when you don’t manage to achieve what you wanted to and you rate yourself as a total failure on the back of this? Your mood and confidence plummet.

Self esteem is conditional therefore as it relies on your performance and this doesn’t entirely add up. As early 20th century philosopher Alfred Korzybski described, “The map is not the territory”. Your performance is not the whole of you. An individual is so much more than the sum of their parts, and so rating our whole selves on the basis of an action, ore even a series of actions, is an unhelpful way of reassuring ourselves that we are worthy and good enough.

We are neither a totally unworthy person because we haven’t done something as well as we had hoped, nor are we a totally good person because we have done something well. We just are.

What’s self acceptance?

If seeking ‘high’ self esteem isn’t the preferred option, what is? The answer is unconditional self acceptance. Self acceptance begins with learning to accept yourself for being you, accepting you for who you are with your unique blend of strengths and weaknesses, your history and experience, the good, the not-so-good and the bad, your thoughts and feelings, and learning to see that in all of this heady mix, you have value, you are worthwhile, you are good enough. In spite of what you may have thought, felt or been led to believe through past experience, you are a complex, worthwhile and unique human being. While your actions may be rate-able, you are not. Unconditional self acceptance is a no-strings attached acceptance of your whole self.

This is a key concept in CBT. It is the expression of compassion towards yourself. It is understanding the human condition of fallibility and deeply acknowledging with compassion where you are at right now, and reaching the conclusion that wherever that is, you have done the best that you can. You have this in common with all human beings, struggling as best you can in the face of adversities in your individual life. Some of it you did not choose.

Acceptance doesn’t mean that you will necessarily like everything that you find, but how does it help you when you struggle against this? Berating yourself for your mistakes or perceived failures keeps your threat levels high, and can lead to ongoing problems with anxiety, anger, depression. By all means you can change and improve on what you do, but essentially rating your self based on your actions is not too sustainable. Even if it works temporarily, it won’t work for long. It’s unstable and, when you think about it, not entirely logical. Rating your whole self in a positive or negative way is too subject to external circumstances which may be out of your control.

Albert Ellis, one of the early front-runners of CBT, describes acceptance as follows, “Accept that acceptance is largely compassion – for you and your self, for others and their self, and for the troubled world and itself.” He advocated compassion in global terms: compassion for self, others and the world. Acceptance of others’ differences or perceived ‘weaknesses’ doesn’t mean we like it, but that we are willing to meet people where they are with a willingness to understand. It leads us to feel emotionally better equipped to talk and resolve differences in a healthy way. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we can begin where we are. If we really want to change the world, we can start with ourselves by practising compassionate self acceptance.

How can we develop self acceptance?

What have you got to lose? Certainly if you believe that berating yourself and labelling yourself in a negative way gets you results, then you may fear self acceptance and compassion. But rest assured, self acceptance is not a soft option. Accepting yourself requires compassion. This in turn needs strength and wisdom and a desire to relieve your human suffering. Compassion means allowing yourself to feel difficult emotions and face up to difficult situations. Nobody said this was easy.

Perfectly imperfect, flawed but faultless

Self acceptance is a lifelong attitude to develop. You can make a start perhaps by thinking deeply on the fact that no human is perfect, every human makes mistakes, every baby is born with equal value. No baby is born thinking that they are not worthy or good enough, this is learned and what you come to believe through circumstance. You may begin to learn to accept yourself through remembering this. Perhaps the following thoughts will get you started…

Author, Alice Walker once wrote: “In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they’re still beautiful.” Imperfection is acceptable, beautiful even.

The Japanese have developed a craft known as ‘Kintsugi’ which means golden joinery or golden repair. Broken ceramics are repaired with a lacquer that is mixed with precious metals. The result is that the flaws in the pots become just a part of the history of the object, rather than something to be discarded or rejected.

My burr oak bowl: beauty in imperfection

There is a type of wood known as ‘Burr oak’. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. The ‘burr’ that you find in this type of wood is actually a flaw in the wood caused by disease, but in reality many people find this imperfection in the grain to be the most attractive. Instead of the expected wood grain, there are unexpected variations in pattern which give unique texture and appearance.

In the end you have a choice. You can choose to develop a compassionate and nurturing relationship with yourself, or you can continue to give yourself a hard time, only conditionally accepting yourself. It takes a concerted effortful approach to changing your attitude to yourself. It may not be a goal you ever reach 100%, but a direction you can choose to take. As long as you are headed in the direction of self acceptance, you will begin to feel better about yourself. What is one small step you could take today towards accepting who you are?

Ali Binns is a CBT therapist based in Bath, UK.

Self acceptance: What’s not on the label

You know the deal. You’ve been promising yourself you’d never do that thing again, and there you go, you made that mistake again. Before you know it, you’re labelling yourself a failure, a loser, a hopeless case. At times in life, we can become prone to labelling ourselves in unhelpful ways. In the heat of the moment, these negative labels reappear momentarily, or, worse, stick around and become a habitual way of thinking.

How does it help us to label ourselves in a negative way? What benefit did you ever get from labelling yourself as a loser, a failure, unlovable or worse? Can you gently become aware of the labels you give yourself and consider for a moment that not only are these labels unfair and unhelpful, but they also don’t make sense.

Of course, on the face of it, you might buy into those labels if you’re feeling depressed, ashamed or anxious, but the truth is, as a human being it’s just not kind to label yourself in the same way you would a piece of luggage.

Let’s look at it another way... Think for example of a jar of jam. Any kind, your favourite perhaps? Think of the label on that jar. What does it say? Maybe Strawberry Jam, Raspberry Jam. What else is on the labels, maybe a short or long list of ingredients?

However detailed you make the list of ingredients on the label, the label will never come close to being the jam itself. The words can’t capture the essence of the jam, the taste, the look, the attributes. Think of yourself in that way, and see if you can give up the habit of labelling yourself.

If we return again to our jar of jam, you might also realise that each jar of jam is unique and each has its own merits. Some people prefer one jam, some like another – a jam can be different fruits, consistencies, home made, shop bought, organic, sugar free, runny or set. Regardless, this doesn't make one jam somehow intrinsically better or more universally valuable than another either. It takes all sorts to create a supermarket shelf of jams, just as it takes all kinds of people to make up a world of human beings. Accept your uniqueness, foibles and all, but above all see if you can peel off the label and see what’s underneath.

Ali Binns works as an accredited CBT therapist in Bath and sees self acceptance as a key to improved mental health. If I can help you, please feel free to get in touch via my Contact page or email info@alibinns.co.uk

A tale of self acceptance: The Two Waves

Ever summed yourself up as a failure, not good enough, worthless or other sweeping negative description? You’re not alone. This tendency to downgrade ourselves if things aren’t going the way we want in life is common place. Self esteem can come crashing down when we do this. In CBT, we call this a global negative evaluation of ourself, and it’s helpful if we can learn to notice when we are doing this and work towards an understanding of the self as far too complex to rate and sum ourselves up with unhelpful all-encompassing evaluations. All too commonly, people suffering from depression, anxiety or stress can sum themselves up as ‘a failure,’ ‘not good enough’, ‘useless’ and so on, when the truth is that none of these can be proved to be 100% true.

Ever noticed yourself doing this? Some of us label ourselves down when things have gone badly in a particular area of our life, but then proceed to sum our whole self up as a result of one mistake or failing. Each person on the planet has a unique and interesting combination of strengths, weaknesses, traits, roles, history, attributes, thoughts, beliefs, emotional responses, so when we explore a ‘global negative rating’, it’s just never true. Each person is so much more than the sum of their parts.

I recently heard this story of the two waves, which I think explains in a vivid way how we are much more than we imagine we are.

There are two waves racing towards the shore, one large and one small. The larger wave is frightened and he says to the little wave, “Oh no, this is it, it’s all over for us. I can see the shore and the cliffs and we are doomed.” The little wave looks back at him and says, “No, we’re fine. I can’t see what the problem is.” The big wave replies, “Look, I am bigger than you, I can see over the top of you and I can see the foam and the shore – I can see that our journey is over.” The little wave looks back and replies, and says, “The end? Not at all you’re not just a wave, you’re the ocean.” The big wave has given himself a self-limiting label, just as we often do, and that has increased his distress as he chases in to shore. Consider for a moment how you might limit your own progress with your own negative labels.

Perhaps you can work on this idea for yourself? Grab a pencil and note down everything you can think of that makes up you. For example, make a note of all your strengths, weaknesses, neutral points, roles in life, beliefs, ideas, attributes, thoughts, likes, dislikes, and feelings.  If it’s hard, you can ask a close friend or family member to get you started. When you’re done, take a look. Now does it make sense to ever sum yourself up in global terms? Can it also be true that you are so much more than any label you give yourself?

Can you begin to learn to accept yourself for who you are – this wonderful one-off and complex human being. There will never be another like you! Sure, you make mistakes, from which you are welcome to learn, or you have weaknesses you'd rather you didn't, but that’s where you’re not alone. Welcome to being human!

I work as an accredited CBT therapist in Bath (MNCS Accred, National Counselling Society) and see self acceptance as one of the keys to improved mental health. If I can help you, please feel free to get in touch via my Contact page or email info@alibinns.co.uk