Feeling like a failure is the dark side of our culture's obsession with being rich, famous and thin.
Who owns the definition of success?
Feeling like a failure might be better reframed as an excessive tendency to compare oneself to others. If you have an uncritical belief that worth can be measured by money, status or fame you are setting yourself up for unhappiness and missing out on other very important areas of human experiencing. Stories abound of successful executives or performers whose personal and spiritual lives were in a shambles.. sometimes to deadly effect.
Initial definitions of success are often inherited from family and culture
One of the first holes that we have to climb out of is the origin of our standards. Up until a certain age (say, nine or ten), we accept the standards of our culture and our families fairly uncritically. For one thing, as children, our intimate universe is largely confined to family, school and neighbourhood and there may be few competing value structures to pull or push us out of them. In adolescence or young adulthood opportunities appear to consciously adopt alternative value systems but we do not always consider this. In fact, if we feel at all unsteady as we go out into the world, unfamiliar value systems may be scoffed at and felt to be inferior or at the very least strange and possibly dangerous. Our inclination to remain with what is familiar, no matter how hurtful it may be to us, is often a trap that confines us like an invisible electric fence. The tiny spark of uncomfortable anxiety that we feel when we are touched by "the shock of the new" is too often enough to make us recoil instinctively... and respond with a put-down, a joke or a snarl ... anything but courageous curiosity and an open mind.
Is Steven Hawkins with his brilliant mind confined to a wheelchair successful in the same terms as an olympic athlete? Is a nun successful in the same terms as a pop star? Is a good mother successful in the same terms as a business executive?
Received values vs Personal values
Question where your visions of success come from.
"Everybody says so" or "Everybody knows" are not actually authorities.
In fact, "everyone" is just as likely to be "no one".
Speak to real people you admire about what they consider important in life. Read biographies of individuals whose lives you consider to be successful. You may be very surprised at what parts of their life they feel humanly best and worst about. The top athlete may value his emotional connection to his team members, or his commitment to his faith or feel deeply proud of his volunteering. The eminent professor may be very proud of his golf score. Even individuals who have achieved substantial "worldly" success may regret other personal paths not taken.
Develop your own authentic vision of a good life and try to live it.
"Everybody's" standards may actually be too vague and general for you as an individual. Positive psychology researchers have discovered that there is a nearly universal set of 24 positively valued human attributes. They include: Love, Curiosity, Fairness, Judgement and Open-mindedness, Love of learning, Creativity, Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence, Honesty, Humor, Self-regulation, Social intelligence, Modesty and Humility, Zest for life, Prudence, perspective and a dozen others. It is worth considering what it might mean to be a success in these domains of value... qualities of character that are honored and appreciated in every age, social group and human culture.
Five ways to feel more successful now.
(1) Choose reasonable goals.Goal setting and motivation work best on mid-level and achievable goals.
YES!... Getting to sing a solo in your church choir or school talent show requires effort and dedication and gets you recognition from real people around you.
NO!... Chasing a fantasy of becoming Britanney Spears by the time you are nineteen is a recipe for heartbreak and frustration.
(2) Take a broader view of success. Include the positive human values proposed above. Write them into your plans and aspirations and check your success and progress in those terms.
(3) Take an incremental view. Incremental means "baby steps." Judge your success by whether you are advancing over-all.
(4) Choose your role models wisely. Focusing your desire to emulate on a real person in your accessible environment has many benefits.
YES!... Find yourself a role model in your community who has access to local facilities, and contacts. They can provide real world support and advice.
NO!... Trying to emulate a multimillionaire international expert in a field is NOT an incremental goal...You will be unnecessarily frustrated by your lack of means and options.
(5) Celebrate your incremental successes. The moment of a success is sometimes fleeting and often private. Fragile memories of genuine successes can be too easily erased by set-backs and hurdles.
So...
Mark your successes mentally and emotionally by talking about them to people you care about.
Write about them in your journal.
Keep a souvenir as a momento.
Raise a glass of wine in a celebratory toast to yourself with a friend.
All these gestures create memory traces and underline "success memories" in your mind so that they are more salient and memorable.
Lost your values? Failure feelings may signal clinical depression. Look for help!
Do you feel adrift? Do you have trouble feeling that anything is of value?
Hopelessness and emptiness are signs of depression. If your feeling of failure is associated with mild or serious depression, it may be wise to seek help. Speak to your doctor to rule out medical reasons for depression, seek counseling to address the emotional or relationship issues that are creating your lowered mood. Resolving your depression may be the first step towards regaining the energy and focus that you need to invest in action and move forward towards your goals.
Worth noting: Research by psychologist Brett Pelham (1993) suggests that even the most highly depressed individuals hold at least one positive self-view and on this aspect of self they feel just as confident and successful as anyone else...or even more successful than others. Pelham observes that depressed individuals often focus positively on these areas in order to lever themselves out of depressed periods.
Beware "non-human, non-solutions"
Individuals who feel unsuccessful may sometimes try to "self-medicate" with drugs or alcohol. Drugs and alcohol temporarily deaden the emotional distress and may fill the individual with chemically induced feelings of success, attractiveness or influence... for a few minutes or hours. These are non-human "non-solutions" which actually do nothing but damage the body and typically rebound emotionally to create even deeper negative self-opinions, ie: "I'm a failure AND I have no will power."
Other individuals may attempt to deflect their worries about success by creating an artificial "show" of material affluence, by spending money to impress others, by engaging in shopping sprees, by endebting themselves to purchase status objects or by gambling and chasing a big win or a big but risky business opportunity, especially if money is their gauge of success.
Non-human, non-solutions ultimately cause more problems than they solve.
One, two, three... Stop feeling like a failure.
(1) Start by being true to your self...
Judge yourself by a unique set of personally meaningful values.
(2) Adopt a questing mindset...
When you are open and curious about your life and experiences there is no such thing as failure, only opportunities for understanding, development and growth.
(3) Avoid falling prey to what "Everybody knows" by seeking "uncommon wisdom"...
It often helps to seek support in this domain. Talking to a therapist or counsellor, or joining a special interest or faith group, can support and underscore the attitudes and perspectives that you are trying to maintain or develop.... and help you start feeling like a success... in the broadest, deepest and most meaningfully human sense.
If you are interested in seeing your own personal rankings of the universal human values mentioned above, consider taking the Values in Action self-test at: http://www.viasurvey.org
To access the French-language version, set your browser to French, then go to the Survey Center. The instructions and the VIA-IS will appear in French, as will your results.
References:
Pelham, B (1983). On the Highly positive Thoughts of the Highly Depressed. In R. Baumeister (ed.) Self Esteem: The Puzzle of Low Self-Regard. New York, Plenum Press. pp.183-199.
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