Reframing Failure & Transcending Regret – Explore and reframe failure

Failure is a normal part of living! By failure, we mean:

When you intend for things to go a certain way, you put in effort to cause this to happen and things don’t work out how you hoped.

This can happen through:

  • inner conflict or low capacity in our experience, preventing us from acting as we’d hoped to
  • our plan of action not being robust enough to consider all of the facets of the situation
  • unexpecteds in complex systems that we couldn’t have possibly planned for or controlled (including someone else’s participation)

In any case, there is often something we can learn or update about our models after things don’t go the way we expected. When something goes awry, it can be a great chance to reflect on the past life cycle of envisioning, designing and acting.

  • What have I learned about reasonable expectations and what might need to be the case to move forward toward my goal? What patterns am I seeing?
  • What challenges & successes were part of this process?
    • What worked? What didn’t?
  • What do I need to let go of? What aspects of this process are no longer working?
  • What am I continuing? What might I need to do to maintain this? 
  • What might I want to start doing, or do more of?
  • What are my next steps?
  • How does what I learned change my model of my intention, my path to get there, or myself?
  • What broader systems or strategies do I need to adjust?
  • What resources (time, money, attention) might I need to redirect?
  • How might I develop my reflection system to check in on what I learned as I’m moving forward?
  • If I zoom out, how might I understand this as an necessary part of the learning process?

Often when we step back, we can reframe the whole thing

Here’s a short video of Herbie Hancock describing his experience of playing jazz with Miles Davis (start at 3 minutes):

Ultimately, the only futures that you can get to from here, are the ones that flow through the present, which means they only exist in the world where all of your mistakes from the past have happened!

To get in touch with this, you can do a long-scale gladitude exercise.

List out 2-4 things that have happened in your life that you feel bad about, that you wish hadn’t happened. This will be easier with things that were longer ago, but you can try it on something as recent as last week. Pick whichever ones spring to mind first, as they’re probably some of your most salient regrets.

Now, for each one, take a moment and ask yourself this simple question:

What things in my life am I glad about, that wouldn’t have happened if this “mistake” hadn’t happened?

People often beat themselves up about mistakes, but it turns out that this doesn’t actually help you avoid mistakes! In fact, blame (including self-blame) usually makes it harder to look at what’s really going on.

Some examples:

  • “I learned something about what happens if you do X”
  • “I learned about how to skillfully recover from Y”
  • “I missed my flight, but ended up having an amazing conversation with a stranger at the airport and learned about investing from them”
  • “I did something spontaneous and creative and delightful the next day or week (such as write a song) which even if it wasn’t directly caused by or inspired by the “mistake”, still just wouldn’t have happened otherwise because I would have been in a different place in my life.”
  • “That retreat was definitely not for me and I kind of knew that before I signed up… I met a person I wouldn’t have met, and I’m glad to know that person! They might become a lifelong friend.”
  • (let us know if you have more real examples we could add here!)

Further reading (but try the exercise first!)

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”

The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.” 

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”

The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.

Alan Watts — Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life