A shared universe › Blog › Starting again after a failure · Español
To get over a failure, it helps to give yourself time to feel it, to separate what went wrong from who you are and to see it as information for the next attempt rather than a verdict. Believing your abilities can grow helps some people, although studies show it works no miracles. Failing hurts. But what weighs most, very often, is not the failure but what we tell ourselves afterwards: “I’m no good”, “the same thing always happens to me”.
The psychologist Carol Dweck observed that we understand our abilities in two ways. Sometimes we think they are fixed: you either have them or you don’t. At other times, that they can be developed with effort, good strategies and help. Someone who sees them as fixed experiences failure as a verdict on themselves. Someone who sees them as something that grows experiences it as information: something has not worked and it is worth trying another way.
In a 2007 study with Lisa Blackwell and Kali Trzesniewski, she followed 373 pupils in their first year of secondary school for two years: the maths marks of those who believed intelligence can be developed rose, while those of pupils who saw it as fixed stayed flat. In a second study, with 91 pupils, teaching this idea improved motivation in class.
The idea became very popular, and it has sometimes been told as if changing your mindset were enough for everything to go well. The data call for more caution. In 2018 Victoria Sisk and her team brought together hundreds of studies with hundreds of thousands of students and found that, overall, the effects were weak. They did see that it might help pupils from poorer backgrounds or at greater risk of falling behind a little more.
In 2019 a large national experiment in the United States, with more than twelve thousand pupils in sixty-five schools, tested an intervention lasting less than an hour. It slightly improved the marks of the lowest-achieving pupils (a tenth of a point in their average grade), and only where the school environment supported it. The authors themselves warn that not every version of this idea improves grades.
In other words: seeing yourself as able to grow can help, especially if there is support around you, but it is not a magic formula.
There is a small change that many people find useful: adding “yet”. “I can’t do it” becomes “I can’t do it yet”. It doesn’t deny that it went badly. It leaves the door open.
It also works for what you tell yourself after a setback: “I didn’t get this job” instead of “no one will ever hire me”. The first sentence describes what happened; the second guesses at a future no one knows.
In the meantime, treat yourself as you would treat a friend who had just been through the same thing. There is more on this in self-compassion: how to start treating yourself better.
Some failures take a great deal with them: a business that held years of savings, a marriage, a life plan. It is normal for a while to find it hard to sleep or to feel like doing anything. If the weeks go by and the sadness doesn’t ease, or if you are finding it hard to get on with your life, mention it to your GP or to a psychologist.
Starting again does not mean forgetting what happened, but slowly finding something that is worth it again. Sometimes that begins with looking after hope when it is hard.
In A shared universe you can light a star with what has not worked out. And when you try again, another with “What I hope for”. Whoever reads you will know how hard it is to get back up.
It is anonymous and free. Other people will keep your star company with a touch or a few words of comfort or hope, and you can come back to say how things are going.