Recovering from failure and demoralization: Scaffolding of Success
Are you feeling down and demoralized these days? If not, well, good for you. If so, here is the complete and total solution to all of your troubles, worries, and concerns. It’s a three-step process, a roadmap for times when one feels like a failure. Or rather: a scaffolding to help go from failure to success.
To review, the Scaffolding of Success is meant to provide not an exact recipe for success but a framework or methodology, or heck, you could even get very 1990s about it and call it a lifestyle, for crafting your own definition of success. Because as so often happens with the big questions of life, there is more than one answer.
The planks of the scaffolding are as follows:
- Permission: As in, give yourself permission to define success as you decide.
- Goals: Set goals related to your definition of success.
- Centering: Practice activities that help you center yourself in the present moment, which is, of course, the only moment we have in which to make decisions.
- Managing the Mind: Use strategies to wrangle your self-doubt, your motivation, and your conflicting emotions.
- Help From Others: Find the team, one person or several, who can help you believe in yourself.
- Values and Purpose: Identify your values and set goals in alignment with them so that you feel your life has purpose.
In practice, it’s a way to live, by working on multiple planks at the same time to help construct your successful life.
As so many wise people have said, it’s the process, not the outcome, that matters. Of course, outcomes indeed matter, but wise people are trying to remind us that the process through which we move towards our desired outcome is life. Life is what we do every day, every moment. It’s particularly important to remember to focus on the journey when the outcome desired may be quite a long time coming. When my ultimate goal might be beyond my natural lifetime, I’ve got to make the process worthwhile.
So, how to get up when you’re down? How to motivate yourself from despondency? What to do when you think the answer is to run away, find a way to buy citizenship in another country, or just watch Netflix and be comatose? How to rally when you have kids, and you don’t want them to be totally incapacitated by cynicism and demoralization. How to embrace Chumbawamba’s anthem, “I get knocked down, but I get up again.”
Focus on three planks: centering, managing the mind, and values and purpose.
Centering
Of course, we know we have to get up. We’re not supposed to lie around wallowing indefinitely. But isn’t a little wallowing OK?
As long as it’s productive wallowing. What it means is what Mary Pipher, Ph.D., points out in her recent opinion piece about how to have a good day when things are generally sucking the wazoo. Productive wallowing is wallowing that involves actually facing your feelings. Like really getting in there and being present to feel them and name them if you can.
Why is naming and knowing important? Because even these most awful emotions are just passing feelings, and it’s by examining them that we can understand they are not all-powerful. They do not have to overpower us forever, and they are not the boss of us. To use a common meditation metaphor, our mind is like the sky, and thoughts and feelings are like the weather, passing by, changing all the time; yet we have a permanent sky behind (above?) all this weather. As we look for breaks in the clouds and observe them passing by, we realize we, the observers, are capable of encompassing not only the weather, the clouds, but also the sky that contains them. We are bigger than the weather.
Whenever knocked down, it may be helpful to remember Stephen Covey’s wisdom about the Circle of Influence and the Circle of Concern.
Notice that the Circle of Influence is inside the Circle of Concern because it is smaller. Our circle of concern is all the things that concern us, that we’re concerned about. Fill in the blanks. Our Circle of Influence is the locus in which we can be effective. Covey says, as you all surely remember, that we need to focus on what we can impact with our actions. The good news is that the more we hone that ability to focus on our Circle of Influence, the more it will expand outward in our Circle of Concern.
So, how then, when we are overwhelmed, and multiple strange, vicious, winged dinosaur-birds are attacking you, do you focus on your Circle of Influence? Well, as we all know, at the most granular level, the only thing over which we have any control or influence at all is how we express ourselves in reaction to what we’re feeling at any one moment. The despondency exists also with an all-too-human need to feel better. At this point, it’s time to act. Taking action is of course the antidote to wallowing. This brings us to the next plank because in short, one needs motivation.
Managing Your Mind
To get through life, to put one foot in front of another, one needs motivation. To hope to eventually fight off the vicious, winged dinosaur birds, is necessary for survival.
Affirmations. We all remember affirmations. Positive affirmations to cure what ails you, to bolster you, to help you achieve your goals. They’re hokey and cringy as they’re usually expressed, and they’re completely stupid as often expressed (The Secret, anyone?). But apparently, scientific research has shown that affirmations do work. As this article in The Washington Post explains, however, these are not the typically satirized affirmations. These are not generic pablum like, “You’re the best!” No, the affirmations that work are specific and they’re helpful because they help motivate you.
A helpful affirmation is something like
- I will do my part to fight injustice.
- I will try to improve every day.
- My self-esteem is healthy.
- I am developing self-confidence.
These are not pabulum. These are actual do-ables. Repeating them reminds us that we can make things happen.
Value and Purpose
Affirmations are effective when they’re rooted in what matters to you. So we’re talking about understanding our deepest values. At a moment of failure, when my values seem to have been trampled over almost to death, it’s important to peel them up off the ground and dust them off and remember that they are immortal, and worth living by.
These affirmations work when they’re authentic. So if you’re feeling really low, an affirmation that is too rah-rah confident will not feel authentic to you. As the article says, something like “I am trying to believe in myself” can be a great affirmation to start with. It’s not grandiose. It’s simple. It’s a hope for a different state of mind.
Affirmations can be simple, humble goads to motivation.
