The Art of Embracing Failure and Finding Balance - Food for Thought

As yesterday’s yoga class began, our teacher Anna began as she always does with a short reading from a dog-eared book, creating focus and directing our intentions for our practice. The piece was short and direct, homing in on the tendency to desire perfection from ourselves and offering a reminder to let ourselves fail a little.

Closing the book, Anna invited us to embrace the wobbles and shakes, imperfect form, and the need to adapt. She offered a phrase from one of her teachers that we might use when we wobbled – “How human of me”.

I smiled and thought - Good one. I’ll write that down when I get home.

You might not know this about me, but failure is sort of my jam. For the last ten years or so, I’ve been studying the topic of failure, leading workshops about it, even doing a full-on research project with a university. I’ve interviewed dozens of leaders from around the globe about it, read every book I can get my hands on and thought about it for hundreds, if not thousands, of hours. I’ve been intrigued by the notion that it might be possible to get really good at this really “bad” part of life, searching for answers on how we might do it. 

When Anna read the passage, it felt familiar and comfortable, like a bedtime story that you’ve heard so many times you know it by heart. I even reacted to her wonderful phrase “How human of me” with a kind of confident anticipation. I knew I’d use it in practice that day, and smiled at the idea of saying it out loud when the wobbles started.

Setting her book aside, Anna directed us to our first posture and laid out her plan for us that day – exploring balance. I knew instantly what that meant. Lots of time standing on one foot at a time, trying to do things my body just doesn’t want to do anymore. My brain’s instant reaction to that knowing was “Shit. I should not have come today.”

BOOM.

In less than a minute, I had moved from feeling all warm and fuzzy about the idea of failure to absolutely refusing to risk it. Even though I totally “know” that I don’t need to get anything perfect in my yoga practice, my brain wanted to stop me from even trying. Even though I know that it’s pushing myself to my edges that helps me get better, my brain still yelled “Hell, no!”. Even though the experience of failing is as familiar as an old friend, my brain wanted me to cut and run.

How human of me.

Through my work over the years in this subject, I understand that one of the basic truths of being human is that technically our cognitive brains love failure, but our egos hate it. The brain is designed to use failure as important data in its quest to learn. We learn to walk by falling and getting up. We learn to talk by forming sounds and experimenting with how they go together. It is the ego – our sense of identity and self – that has a fit about it. The ego has a hard time distinguishing the difference between “I failed” and “I am a failure”. My ego is the part of me that wants the world to see me as competent, smart and capable of doing headstands in yoga class. The clash between the two never ends for us humans.

My instant resistance to Anna’s plan for that hour of my life wasn’t cowardice or incompetence, it was me being a human. It was my brain doing the thing it’s designed to do.

How long had my brain gone crazy with its temper tantrum? Not long.

Maybe a minute. That minute was long enough to begin stirring up some strong emotions and irrational thoughts. Had I let this train of thought turn into a runaway locomotive, I would have spent the entire hour of class miserable and frustrated. I know this because I’ve done it before.

All my work and study and what some might call “expertise” on Failure had not prevented me from having a strong reaction to the possibility of failing, even when I knew that it didn’t matter. When I noticed it, I was kind of shocked at how fast and intensely it had happened. What that work did help me do, though, was to catch myself quickly. I was able to recognize those thoughts and see what my brain was doing. And when I noticed it, I was able to decide what I wanted to do with it.

Anna was probably wondering why, only one minute into our practice and still in our warmup, I was smiling and shaking my head. It was because I was thinking I haven’t even done anything yet and I’ve already needed her tool.

How very human of me.

In case you’re wondering, I absolutely wobbled my way through practice. As always, Anna pushed my body to its edges. This time, though, I didn’t mind the wobbles. In fact, the more I welcomed them, the more stable I seemed to get. By the end of class, I was amazed at what I had been able to do.

As it turns out, the balance work I was really needing was deeper inside. My brain and my ego both have important work to do. I can’t choose between them any more than I can choose between left and right. It has gotten me wondering - how many things have I missed out on in life because I’ve let them get out of balance? How much unnecessary suffering have I experienced because I wasn’t paying attention?

How about you?

• What are the ways that your brain tries to get you to avoid the hard stuff?
• How is your ego sneaking its fear of failure into the nooks and crannies of your life?
• What might change if you could catch yourself being human today?

Just a little food for thought.