FROM FAILURE TO FEEDBACK

In the last post on this subject, I mentioned that we have several of the NLP presuppositions that deal with communication. There I quoted three and addressed the first two. Let’s now look at that third one.

You cannot not communicate. The meaning of your communication is the response you get regardless of your intention. When you communicate, there is no failure, only feedback (only responses).

"There Is No Failure, Only Feedback." When it comes to the experience of failure, the great majority of people on Planet Earth believe in it. First, they believe there is such a thing. Next they believe it is a bad thing. They also believe they should avoid it at all costs. Worse of all, they believe they could become “a failure” if certain events occur. Talk about a sad and pathetic perspective!

For one who believes in failure, you can imagine how shocking it must be to hear this statement, There is no failure, only feedback!? I know that I experienced, at least, some degree of shock when I first heard it, but it has been so long ago and this statement is now so well integrated within me, that I can’t even recall a time when I didn’t believe it. How about you? What do you believe? Do you believe there is such a thing as “failure?” Do you believe that there are such experiences? Or do you believe that whatever happens, you can just as easily classify it under the category of “feedback?”

If you do still tend to think about “failure,” try on this thought experiment.

Suppose that you shifted your thinking so that there was no failure. What would happen if you began thinking and experiencing what otherwise might be called a “failure” as feedback of information? How would that affect your state, your emotions, your relationships, and your willingness to take risks?

There is no failure, only feedback is a reframe. This statement frames the meaning of an experience that did not turn out the way you wanted it to, or hoped that it would, not as a “failure,” but as “feedback information.” As such, it informs you about how to adjust what you did to see if you can get another response. If you took on this new frame, it would turn you into a ferocious learner and as someone with tremendous flexibility to adjust when something doesn’t work.

With this frame, now when you communicate with someone, and you do not get the response you wanted, you have your next step. What do you now do? You alter your communication! Given that what you did, did not work, you try something different. Simple as that. There’s no need for creating a big emotional state of disappointment or depression or anger or anything else. Use the experience for learning instead. Use it to more quickly succeed.

There is no failure, only feedback, when well integrated into yourself, becomes an attitude. As a frame of meaning, it offers you a new mind-set that can generate one of the most productive set of attitudes that contributes to effective and successful living. It facilitates the set of attitudes of learning, adjustment, flexibility, resilience, and persistence. What a contrast to the old attitude of fear-of-failure and a demandingness that you only try what you know you can succeed at. With an attitude like that, you will live in a state of fear and apprehension and almost never try anything new.

The new attitude is that you can “invent solutions as you go.” You don’t have to have everything figured out ahead of time. You don’t have to live in a constant fear of failure. You don’t have to procrastinate on getting started because everything is not perfect. You can start today and experiment as you go. Accessing the set of attitudes of always learning, being flexible in adjusting, getting back up when you get knocked down (resilience), and persisting until you find the secret for succeeding, you keep at it.

Most people give up far too easily. They give up on projects, businesses, marriages, friendships, etc. because they take the information and communication about something not working as failure instead of as feedback. Thomas Edison had that set of attitudes and so kept experimenting in search of a filament for his light bulb. His frame of mind was not a thousand failures, but a thousand ways to not to make a light bulb. He did not treat each as a disappointment. He treated each as one more thing he could check off as not working. Now on to the next!

In the area of communication, there is no failure, only feedback, enables you to focus on the response that you did get as feedback. “So what does this tell me?” “What can I learn from this?” “Given this, what would be the next most intelligent thing to try?” And how much more creative and productive are these responses? Obviously, a lot!

If you are still not convinced, then let’s do a linguistic analysis of this scary word. What kind of a word is failure, linguistically? Linguists call it a nominalization. That means someone took an action word, a verb, and turned it into a noun by nominalizing or naming it. But it is a false-noun. There is no such thing, failure is not “a person, place, or thing,” it is just a name. Once we turn the false-noun back into a verb, we have “to fail,” or “fail” at. Now we can ask about the object: What did you fail at? When did you fail at it? By what criteria are you making this evaluation? Anything stopping you from trying again? What have you learned that contributes to not succeeding?

Literally, there is no such thing as “failure.” That’s why you can’t see it, hear it, feel it, smell it, or taste it. It is not real in that sense. It is a word that describes a mental judgment. What there is that you can see and hear and maybe feel is a response from what you did. You cracked a joke, but no one laughed. You “failed” to get laughter. Was your timing off? What the joke not understood? Was the punch-line messed up? Was it a pun and people groaned instead of laugh? All of this gives back to you information (“feedback”) that you can use to get better at telling jokes. Well, you can get better if you are open to the response you get, notice it, and use it for learning.