There’s that NLP presupposition: There is no failure, only feedback It’s tied into ideas that if you try something and it doesn’t work, use it as a learning experience and try something else. Which is lovely, because so many people have so many negative connotations surrounding the word failure, mainly because of the meaning described in number two below:
failure
1. The condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends: the failure of an experiment.
2. One that fails: a failure at one's career.
3. The condition or fact of being insufficient or falling short: a crop failure.
4. A cessation of proper functioning or performance: a power failure.
5. Nonperformance of what is requested or expected; omission: failure to report a change of address.
6. The act or fact of failing to pass a course, test, or assignment.
7. A decline in strength or effectiveness.
8. The act or fact of becoming bankrupt or insolvent.
But then, is being *one that fails* even possible in the first place? You might fail a lot, and it might be possible that failure becomes deeply bound up in your identity, which is a tragedy because it is impossible to *always* fail at *everything.* Taken to its conclusion it’s ludicrous. Flip it around, what about calling someone a success? When? And in what context? Honestly ask yourself whether you’d have an issue with calling yourself a success. It’s just as misleading and untrue as calling yourself a failure, but it fewer unpleasant connotations (not allowing for everyone’s idiosyncrasies in the way they understand words).
I think this is potentially more about wounding a person’s ego than anything else, and I think that the NLP presupposition described above is also about helping people to save face. It’s sometimes useful to allow people to do this. But then it’s also an extremely useful thing in other contexts to fail, to fail utterly, to fail when it was something that was really important to you, so that you can grieve and understand your mistakes and spend a good deal of time building the lesson into who you are as a person.
There are some people who really need to hear that they’ve failed. I can think of a lot of extremely self-important, self-deluded people on my NLP course who could have benefited from such a temporary wound, if it was done in a way that would have allowed them to pay attention rather than justifying themselves in their ego. I do this quite a lot on the phone every day with callers, when they come the line with righteous fury against a neighbour or an ex-partner and you can see every failure they’ve made in the situation themselves.
And there are some people who don’t, and who need to be built up instead. People who might quite readily but unrealistically see themselves as a failure, because they have a number of personal failures that loom large in their field of attention. Either way, you’d want to be careful about how you use the word fail around either arbitrary category of person, and you’d want to be careful about how you’d use it to describe yourself. |
