The Psychology of your 20s - 25. Conquering failure in your 20’s

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

What does psychology have to say about our fear of failure and how can we change our mindset to one that embraces the mistakes we are inevitably going to make? This week we discuss failure of many sorts in our 20’s: relationships, academic, in the workplace. Tune in!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world.

Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's TWO. percent on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Look Back at it podcast. From 1979, that was a big moment for me. 84 was big to me.

I'm Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. 84 was a wild year. It was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black people.

Listen to look back at it on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor. It signals to the world that you not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that doesn't. not mean that you need to listen to learn the hard way on the iha radio app apple podcast or wherever you

get your podcast and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s the podcast where we talk through some of the big changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology this week we're discussing the psychology of failure um this was inspired by a sex in the city episode i've been obsessed with that show recently. I don't know why. Maybe it's like moving to a new city, a big city that's really got me into it, but Carrie did a, did an, um, what is it called? An article, I guess, on failure and I was like, this is great inspiration from the podcast, or for the podcast. So, from now on, all podcast episodes will make direct references to sex in the city episodes. But that aside, I think the reason why it kind of stuck with me is because we're

were all inevitably going to fail in our 20s, probably multiple times, whether at work or uni in relationships, dealing with finances or leaps of faith where we fall short. Even just like perceiving failure and things that aren't really failures, they're just mistakes or things we wish we'd done differently. So I think it's important to kind of get our head around it. And for me at the moment. I think there's just been a few things in the past six months where I've felt like a sense of failure for some reason. Perhaps it's unjustified. But yeah, most of these episodes I kind of just do because it's something I'm thinking about a lot at the moment. So if you're in the same boat, hopefully you get something out of this episode. But before we dive in, I just want to say thank

you for all the support and love. My two recent episodes have gotten, the one I did, the two that I did with Claudia. I have been getting heaps of messages from people who have been tuning in. And honestly, it makes me so happy. It makes my day. I like heard this quote the other day and it says, when you put something out there in the world, 10% of people are going to hate it. 80% of people are going to be indifferent and 10% of people are going to love it. So for all of those who do love it, thank you so much for reading, for reaching out to me and making that known. And if you do feel called to do so, please consider leaving a review on either Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It would be, obviously, massively appreciated. It helps the podcast grow, helps my ego a little bit.

And then as always, thanks for tuning in to this episode. Failure is such a messy, messy concept in our younger years when small mistakes can feel so life-altering and permanent. But the more mistakes we make, the more I guess we learn that they aren't the end of the world, the consequences don't last forever, and the more we kind of learn in general. So this episode, we're going to talk about why failure is important in this decade of our lives, how it affects our behavior and our self-concept and how to overcome negative feelings or perhaps a fear of failure. How to move on to let's go. I think failure is not just, confined to our professional or academic lives as we so often think they are, you can fail at

so many things in your 20s and chances are it's going to be the first of many more times we experience that feeling. Like I said, I do think we often think about failure in terms of constructed, you know, almost artificial settings where you either pass or you fail. There's no gray area and the decision is kind of made for you, you know, failing an exam, failing a driving assessment, failing to get a job that you really wanted. But in this episode, I want to kind of push out a little bit further and talk about a sense of failing at something more intangible and the sense that you can fail in any area of your life, not just academic, professional or an examination sense.

So, an example. I was talking to a dear friend the other day about her long-term relationship that had ended just recently. And they had been together for two years and as we were kind of debriefing and going through the timeline of events, I asked her if she had told her parents yet. And she said no, that she hadn't. And when I asked her why, she said she was embarrassed. She didn't want them to think that she had failed at her relationship. And I remember having a similar feeling after someone I was dating. After I ended things, I felt like such a failure.

A failure for having invested time in this person, a failure for not having seen the red flags, seeing the signs, for having told my friends and my family that I really like this guy, only for, you know, things to come to an end in a way that was like not amazingly satisfactory. And in the aftermath,

I feel like I felt like I couldn't trust myself or my judgment anymore. And that's such a critical feature of the sense of failing, the self-loving that comes afterwards. So we are going to metaphorically kind of fail at so many things in our 20s. We're going to fail at keeping friendships fail at feeling successful enough. Sometimes the stakes are really high. But for most people, I would say, this decade of our 20s is a time when failures won't mean the end of the world or life as you know it. I'm guessing you don't have kids. You don't have big financial responsibilities, meaning you have a bit more of a safety net.

You can always pick up your life and move. You know, nothing's really holding you down to the environment that you've made those failures in. So it's the perfect time to kind of teach yourself to pick yourself up and learn the lessons that that moment and that experience was intended to teach you. And the chances are you'll fail again and again and again in different ways until one day you'll just start failing at something different. So what does psychology have to say about the impact of failure on our minds, our behavior, our self-concept?

How can we adopt, I guess, a more positive relationship with making mistakes and failing in this formative decade of our lives? So failure, it hits us where it hurts for a number of reason, and it starts really early on in childhood, as so many reactions and patterns often do. Failure and fault are virtually inseparable in so many households, in so many organisations and cultures. Every child learns at some point that admitting failure also means taking blame.

Perhaps you're scolded or you're told to go to bed, you know, you let the dog outside by accident or you fail a test and you receive some form of punishment for your behaviour. and your failure, which leads to a negative internal reaction and a bad feeling that you inherently want to avoid. So after repeated positive or negative punishment, so either the removal of a good thing or the introduction of a bad thing to influence our behavior by an outside force, maybe a parent or a teacher, soon we don't even need those figures in our lives to make us feel bad and to get us to avoid mistakes.

We have internalized that feeling. Now we have a fear of failing. We stop ourselves from failing because we've had enough experiences to anticipate what will happen if we do. We've been conditioned to know the outcome of our failures and to know that those are not great outcomes. They're things we want to avoid. So we begin to self-monitor and inflict that negative feeling or punishment that we

normally receive from an external figure on ourselves. So these early learning experiences, I think, are why so few cultures and people have shifted to an attitude of almost psychological safety in which the rewards of learning from failure can be fully realized. And there's another key reason we avoid failure and it has to do with the perception of interpersonal or group shame. At the root of failure and a fear of failure is shame, which is a very unpleasant emotion associated with feeling like you're a bad person or are a flawed or defective individual.

If I make a mistake, if I fail, how does that affect who I am and how I see myself, as well as how others see me? How will others see me is such a huge element of this anti-failia conundrum. And there's a very traditional and well-treaded idea in psychology that humans naturally seek the favor, acceptance, and admiration of the groups that they belong to. Maybe it's your friendship group, your family group, your religious group, your academic group. We want to be in the in group, basically. And one way that we stay liked by the group we're in is by sticking to the rules or blueprint on what behavior is accepted,

what actions and outcomes are accepted and which ones aren't. And if we stray, we may be outcast. And when we were primitive beings, that meant, you know, pretty much certain death if you weren't part of a tribe or a group. And that sense of fear, that fear reaction, it survives today in our limbic system. And that's a crucial part of the old brain that controls our behaviour to ensure survival, often unconsciously. And that's a big part of this.

It's unconscious. So let's give an example. Say you make like a really big mistake at work, been there, done that, got the T-shirt. You failed to kind of meet your boss's expectations for, I don't know, presentation or whatever, whatever you do for work. And the consequences of this will likely be criticism or some kind of critique that feels like rejection. And for a while, you might not feel like you are as respected or liked at work. you may not feel as accepted by the group. And that's where a big failure of failure comes from,

the notion that you could be cast out from a group whose respect and favour you unconsciously need, you want, you crave. And the impact of failure is pretty magnificent on our self-concept and our confidence. Self-esteem or our self-concept, it's a self-evaluation construct that corresponds to an overall view

of what we kind of contemplate and evaluate about ourselves, both internally, how we see ourselves and how we think others see us. Successes and failures, they're just inextricably linked to that, and they influence your mood, they influence your emotional states, all to varying degrees, as well as self-esteem levels, insofar that these events are perceived as personal successes or failures, which either contribute to the image you have or detract from it. Emotions and self-esteem, they're linked in everyday experience,

such that people with high self-esteem report more positive states of emotion, and people who lack self-worth are generally in more of a negative mood. So when we fail, when a relationship breaks apart, when we lose a job or we miss out on an opportunity, this influences the characteristics and thoughts we assign to ourselves and can be really damaging for our self-esteem. And it can take a while to recover and receive the necessary reinforcement to rebuild those aspects of our identity that have been threatened by a failure. And I think importantly, but kind of like the modern 20-something person, social media also threatens to make

every slip-up an extinction level event socially and professionally. which contributes to this shame avoidance framework for our fear of failure that we kind of discussed before. Good news. When we get older, our failures don't seem to hurt our self-concept and the opinion or image we hold of ourselves as much. So in one study, researchers found that the impact that perceived failure has on our positive emotional states, it declines the older we are. I think older adults are assumed to change their affect states and reaction to positive and negative stimuli across the lifespan, but to less severe degrees. They also have more experiences and learning opportunities to now be able to appraise a potential failure for what it actually represents, which is something that isn't a really big deal. According to a lot of theoretical frameworks, older adults are just better equipped to regulate their emotional.

states and to use this regulatory ability to manage positive and negative emotions that may affect how they see themselves, to kind of see them as something that yes, is related and yes, influences how they see themselves but isn't the be all and end all. So I guess that is something to look forward to. But in our 20s, there are certain people who can handle failure better than others. And I'm sure you've seen this amongst your friends, you know, the person who experiences a huge step back and it doesn't seem to bother them versus, I guess, people like myself, who it really does kind of get to. So this psychologist, Taya Cohen from Carnegie Mellon, I think, yeah, that's it. Carnegie Mellon makes the distinction between guilt-prone people and shame-prone people.

So bear with me here. When some people make mistakes, they tend to focus more narrowly on their behavior. You know, I made a mistake, I did a bad thing, and now I'm going to think of ways to correct for this, I'm going to improve. And that's an example of a guilt-prone person. They feel guilty for the mistake, but recognize it and use it as kind of motivation to change something outside of themselves and act in a way that they can avoid the problem in the future. and this psychologist Cohen says this type of person is different than the other group of shame prone people. So the shame prone person is kind of like this. If you do something wrong, you might think I'm a bad person rather than just I did a bad thing and I made a mistake.

And if you think you're a bad person, that's much harder to counteract. And that might lead you to withdraw from people. So a healthier response to failure is focusing on, specific behaviours rather than looking at the experience as a reflection of yourself because you can easily change your behaviour but it's much harder to change who you are or who you think you are researchers have also found that people who strongly fear failure have a composite of two personality characteristics low achievement orientation that is they don't take much pleasure from accomplishment and meeting goals and high test anxiety, a fear of not performing well at a critical

moment. So in other words, they're motivated less by the possibility of winning and gaining something of value, and they're more motivated by their anxiety about the possibility of messing up. And those are some of the same personality traits that drive perfectionism. And it can show up in people who are high achievers and people who are less motivated to achieve. Doesn't matter. In fact, perfectionism, I think, and fear of failure go hand in hand from a clinical perspective. There's one type of individual for whom failure is particularly hard to deal with and overcome. And if this is you, I'm so sorry. But maybe you'll listen to this kind of profile of this person and, you know, be able to be like, oh, it's not me. It's this condition. So Adelaophobia is a phobia.

or deep fear of failure which may lead people to avoid any situation where failure could take place, hence isolating themselves from new and novel experiences and opportunities. So Adelaphobia is often referred to as perfectionism, and whilst it is considered extreme perfectionism, this associate professor of psychiatry at the Will Cornel Medical College, his name is Dr. Gail Saltz, he says that it's more than that. It is a true irrational. And that's the key word when we think about phobia's irrational. Fear of making any form of mistakes.

As with any phobia, people with adelaophobia think about the fear of making a mistake in a way that means they have to avoid situations where there's a risk of that happening. And that's the other key feature of a phobia avoidance, so irrational and avoidance. And they also obsess a lot about. mistakes that they've made in the past or imagine mistakes they could make in the future. And these thoughts kind of cause them to have overwhelming anxiety, another aspect of a phobia. So it might make them feel panicky or nauseous, dizzy, or experience a rapid heartbeat. That kind of panic that sets in for a fear of failure, which is irrational.

And it often leads to constant judgment and a negative evaluation that you could never believe you're doing things the right way and it's a kind of perfectionism that's more than just striving for excellence or ambition you know we all innately wish to be successful however on some level the average person can anticipate accept and tolerate shortcomings we can tolerate mistakes and failed attempts but people with adela phobia they just feel crushed by even the idea of a failed attempt and it often makes them miserable and depressed and perhaps like, I don't know if this is part of the clinical definition, but definitely probably worse off because they aren't actually ever able to try new things and learn lessons from situations in which you're inevitably going to fail.

I think an intense fear of failure is not a place we want to be in. And there's this saying, fail hard, fail soon and fail often. And I really love this saying, even if I struggle to fully realize it most of the time. We talked about this shift in mind frame earlier. But how is it that we can have a healthy relationship with failure such that it creates growth rather than shame? How can we be okay with failing often and not only be okay with it, but make it part of our life philosophy? Okay, I'm not going to give you a simple equation here. because I'm not a licensed psychologist.

I'm not a, I don't know, a life coach. Nor am I going to say, you know, our failure is avoidable if you just try a little harder. Like, we can get away with never failing. That's silly talk. That is so silly. Obviously, you're going to fail. Isn't that just, it's a part of life? You know, every parent has said that to you, I'm sure.

But I think it's important to talk about how our relationship with failure can change for the better. So there's a common clinical tool in psychology. It's called cognitive behavior therapy. For those who haven't heard about it, which I'm sure if you've ever been to a therapist, you have, but the gist is this. If you can change your perception of an event or an experience so that you would praise it as being positive or at the very least, not life-ruining, you allow yourself to behave in a manner that reflects that new mind frame.

So it's kind of like, I don't know, like a train. If you get the first part of the train moving, the second part follows. And we can apply this to failure. Choose a reasoning that works best for you. So maybe it's failure is nothing but an opportunity to grow or everyone fails. No one's paying attention to me in particular. Maybe it's, you know, with every failure, I'm one step closer to doing this right. Whatever justification you need, you get to choose it.

Find the thing that you can accept more than you can, you know, not accept failure and repeat that until you no longer feel threatened by the idea of screwing up or hurt by previous mistakes and failures that you've made. It's almost like an affirmation or it's like a soothing tool. Your cognition of a situation is linked to how you behave or react to that situation, as CBT says. Therefore, if you change your perception around failure, your acceptance of it as a part, of life and something important will follow suit. I think also importantly you need to detach the outcomes of your actions to your self-concept and that's something we talked about when we were referring to older people and how they're kind of more

chill with it. Failure, it's linked to feelings and emotions like sadness, anxiety, stress, maybe even rage and those feelings are incredibly uncomfortable for any person and we will do anything to get rid of them. But they don't need to become deeply embedded truths about yourself. Those feelings and emotions will help you work harder to find different and better solutions in order for you to improve the next time. If you recognise that the consequences of your actions are just that, there are an outcome of a series of events and decisions,

not just your self-concept. Sometimes there are things you can't control. You're not defective. because you've failed. There's always going to be new opportunities. There's going to be new things to strive for. So I think with much of psychology embracing that negative state while it's there, learning from it, not trying to avoid it, that can lead to healthy coping mechanisms rather than isolation, projection or suppression. It's not very growth mindset of you if you just suppress those negative feelings. And worst case scenario, it might lead to like a phoenix.

pattern of behaviour in which you don't even allow yourself to be in situations where you could make a mistake and then are you really fulfilling your potential? I don't know. Those are just some of my my more nuanced musings. I hope that despite the weird ramblings of this episode you've managed to take something in, learn something about the psychology. It's a bit of a shorter episode this week. I know. I'm sorry. I guess it's interesting. Like, failure, I've kind of been feeling that a lot recently, just with like making a big life decision, friendships ending, relationships ending, yeah, and just feeling pretty down on myself about how come I couldn't have anticipated the outcomes of some of my actions a little bit better.

But at the end of the day, I think this is just such a learning period in everyone's life. if you're around the same age as me, which I'm guessing you are if you're listening to this podcast. Yeah, I just think changing your mind frame is so important away from, you know, I failed, I failed, I failed to like, what did I learn here? And just some of those recent experiences, like, there's just been so many lessons that have come through. Despite, like, you know, not so much pain, but like the hurt of the experiences. So, yeah, just very excited to, like,

for the next chapter, I guess. But I think that's also silly. There's never chapters. It's just one big life. One big story. No chapters needed. Anyhow, sorry. Just using this as my personal journal.

I guess sometimes I find it that way because I know that I'll be the one probably listening back to this in 10 years. And it's good to kind of know where I was at. But I hope you did enjoy this episode. I hope you learned something. I hope if you have Adelophobia, you get some help because that shit sounds brutal.

And thanks again for listening. Follow us on Instagram. Follow us on Facebook. I never use the Facebook page. But it's there. If that's your cup of tea, leave a review. I love when people leave me reviews.

I'll be sending you air kisses from afar if you do that. And I hope you have a magnificent week. I know uni started again. I know works back on. People are starting new jobs. It's all very exciting. So throughout all that, scared to fail and don't be scared to reach out and listen to the podcast. Wow, that was really smooth.

Anyhow, I will see you guys soon. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. I'm on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side. a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's TWO% on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the Look Back at it podcast. For 1979, that was a big moment for me. 84's big to me. I'm Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors.

Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. 84 was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor. It signals to the world that you're not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to.

Listen and learn the hard way on the IHard radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHart podcast. Guaranteed human.