It is said that Failure is a part of journey to success. No one has got the real meaning of success till the time he has learned from his failures. The ability to rise and take the challenges head on is something that makes a real winner. But how many of us have really succeeded in what we have set ourselves for. We quit, change our course, and sometimes even deny accepting the failure. We set ourselves for things which is not in line with our abilities and when truth show up on our face; the transition is nothing but painful. The solution is not in avoiding the sight of failure but to understand its psyche to help us prepare for next steps.

Any failure big or small always has its implications on human life. A child being punished by his teachers or parents, A husband failing to live up to expectations of his wife, An employee getting thrashed by his employer are nothing but signs of failure. Many times we keep expectations from the person who has failed without realizing that it can be the conduct or behavior of the external environment, rather than the person himself, that can make the real difference. Yes, whenever you try to label someone as loser, think and look inside yourself to see if solution lies with you. Punishment is a reward for failure that does nothing but solidifies the feeling of it.

The Psyche of Failure is interesting and it teaches us how our conduct can really avoid breeding losers. Understand it and you can really do well in both your personal and professional life. When you know the nuances of failure you would be better prepared to convert them to your advantage. Five reasons that expose failure are explained below

1)     Negative Reinforcement- There was an experiment conducted long time back called Pygmalion effect where a team of students was labeled losers and eventually they started to behave like one. The experiment was repeated in many other scenarios and it was found that labeling someone as loser reinforces the feeling of it. The human mind has tendency to accept the state of failure and when that happens it breeds nothing but more failure. It is exactly opposite to positive reinforcement where every success gives us confidence and prepares us for next battle.

2)     No Associated Learning- No one wants to be a loser. No one infact wants to stay in the company of the loser. We expect people to learn from their failures but it is definitely not an easy task. Loneliness and rejection are part of losing and it takes time to get over them. Whenever a person loses there is no associated learning which can be comprehended immediately. At best person is left to find his own reasons and believe in his own assumptions.  Some failures are like dead end in our life and we don’t know what to do next. There is infact no one available to decode it for a loser. Many questions remain unanswered and it promotes nothing but negative reinforcement.

3)     No Predictability- We can expect a winner to excel and make more space for himself in life. But nothing can be predicted from a loser. The path after every win is always up but it is not the same in case of losing. A loser can learn from his mistakes, can go in oblivion, or can do numerous things which we cannot even expect. When the situations turns negative the results can be nothing but unpredictable.

4)     Negative Association- Failure is always associated with stimuli that have made it happen. A child who has failed in Sciences and has been punished for it develops a negative association for the subject. For the child the Subject Sciences gets associated with Failure. This happens for many things in many situations where we develop a negative association that spells failure for us. Such things get deeply embedded in our mind and uprooting them then becomes herculean task.

5)     Avoiding Stimulus- Once a Negative Association gets developed in human mind, rather than taking it head on, people try to avoid it. Punish a child for failing and next time he would devise ways to escape the punishment. Punish someone for smoking and he would devise ways to avoid doing it in front of you. Punish a Customer Care executive for treating customer badly and he may avoid the customers of same nature in future. In all cases the stimulus when rewarded with punishment makes the person avoid it at any cost. In same way rather than working toward success there is much probability that a loser would associate failure with certain stimulus and then would try to avoid it in future.

The Solution- The solution lies in creating more winners than losers. Both in our Personal and Professional life we need to devise ways and means to breed more winners than losers. In home, within our family, it makes sense to celebrate small success and derive a meaning from it. In our office it makes sense to lower threshold of winning and make it act like base. It is said that “You need to reach the right bird for flock to follow”. In same manner you need to reinforce positive emotions through small wins and the success would follow.

Photo Credit- lysander07

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