Failure Archives - Spartan Christianity

Resilience – How to Recover Rapidly

Resilience is the ability to adapt to situations or recover quickly from a failure. The great value of resilience is that the faster you can recover, the faster you can give another attempt. The skill comes in learning how to think correctly so you maximize your recovery and ability to withstand discomfort.

It is also the ability to be flexible in the face of ever-changing circumstances. If you encounter difficulty on the job, you want to go see the person who is not fazed by this. You want to talk to the person who can laugh in the face of difficulty and begin to generate solutions faster than you can even tell him the problem. The goal we should have as men is to become that person. You must be the person who produces solutions. You are the one who is flexible in the face of chaos and disorder.

Let us look at a few of the key attributes of resilience.

I – Mental Recovery

The essence of resilience is the ability to recover quickly from any event. Whether minor setback, outright failure, or during mental training, the ability to recover fast is key. This is the mental equivalent of resting between sets of physical exercise you want your body to be able to recover in the time allotted to that your performance on the next set will not be reduced.

One of the simplest ways to do this is to simply subject yourself to more events that will tax you. This is a difficult path, but it is very beneficial as well. The more times you can fail, the faster you will be able to recover from failure. You will condition your mind to realize that no failure is permanent. There is no single mistake that can cripple you for life (outside of a felony or something like that).

In the modern world, the majority of our failures or setbacks do not really harm us at all. Our very survival is not at stake when we take an exam or go for a job interview. Nearly every society has some form of a social safety net that can catch us if we faceplant. Therefore, there is no excuse for us to avoid trying many new things. We should race towards failure, knowing that in it is the growth of character and resilience we are looking for.

Mental recovery is also the bottleneck for all other recoveries. We have to be able to recover in our minds before we can get our body to attempt something again. How fast the brain can recover is the rate-limiting step for our total recovery.

II – Physical Training

We can simulate adversity and failure with our physical training. Just like we can train to recover faster in the gym, we can use those principles and learn how to recover faster in our mental training.

If you want to recover faster in the gym, you have to look at the root of recovery and see where you need to improve. Do you need to work on your heart, lungs, nervous system, or muscular system? Which one of those is limiting your recovery? Once you figure that out, you can begin to train it. You can research new training ideas to isolate the system you want to train. You can track your results and see how well you improve over time. There are a number of ways you can train your body and recover faster.

You can do the same thing with your mind. Find the bottlenecks for your mental recovery. Is it the inability to get over failure? Perhaps a low tolerance for work volume. Maybe you are burnt out and need to figure out how to recover while still moving forwards. Whatever it is, you cannot fix it without first identifying it.

Once identified, you can start experimenting with different recovery tactics and see which one works for you. If you are burned out, research how people recover from burnout and what the causes of it are. Learn how to increase your work tolerance and complete more tasks with the same working hours and energy.

The key to rapid growth is to fix whatever problem is the main limiting factor. Once you fix that, you improve in every other facet of your performance. Learn from mentors and people who have been in your shoes before. There is no need to figure out everything through trial and error. Learn from the experiences of others, this will allow you to learn rapidly. If you learn rapidly, you recover rapidly. Pursue knowledge so you can first know yourself so that you can recover and build resilience.

III – Reframing Experiences

To mentally recover, we often have to reframe the experience. This also applies to the anticipation of events that may lead to recovery. Where we choose to focus our minds will be what determines our resilience. If we choose to focus on the negatives, the consequences, or the dangers, we will train our minds to fear and be anxious. But if we focus our minds on the positives, the benefits, and our capabilities, we train our minds to be resilient.

When facing a new event that is causing you fear, shift the focus in your mind. You change your focus by changing your questions. Instead of asking, “What am I going to do when I fail?”, ask, “How am I going to succeed?” Your brain will give you an answer for any question you ask. So, make sure your questions build you up instead of tearing your strength down.

Even if the event is frightening and you are afraid of negative results, write down all the positives that would result from a seemingly negative failure. Write down your problem on paper. Write down what would be the worst that could happen if you failed. Then write about how you would recover from the failure. What action would you take to immediately get back on your feet and start recovering and moving towards a new goal? If we choose to stay still and wallow in our failure, we will only become depressed. But if we begin moving towards a new goal, that movement will fill us with energy, and we will recover.

The worst thing you can do for an injury is to give it pure bedrest. The best thing you can do is get the joint moving as much as you can tolerate and begin to recover. You must do the same thing with your mind.

When it comes to previous failures, you must learn to look back on the lessons you learned while leaving behind the pain associated with the mistake. This can be very difficult, but it is very beneficial to us. No man wants to relive the pain of failure over and over again, yet we do this on a regular basis! Instead of leaving the mistake behind, we choose to play the event again and again in our minds. We reopen those old wounds, experience the worst parts of the failure, and restart the mourning process again. This is no way to succeed as a man.

When we look back on our mistakes, we need to be able to pull out everything we learned and turn a blind eye to everything that is painful. You can do this by learning to first laugh at the failure. If you can laugh at it, your brain will not take it as seriously as before. It must not have been a big deal if you can laugh about it.

Second, look at all the benefits of that mistake. Intentionally look for ways that the mistake led to future opportunities or successes. When you first try this exercise, do not be surprised if you cannot think of anything. Your brain is stilled scarred from the experience. It wants to say, “there is not one single good thing that resulted from that mistake! Don’t ask me that again!” But you must continue to ask it, eventually, it will find an answer just to get you to stop bothering it.

Third, be grateful for the successes and for the lessons. It is difficult to experience negative emotions while also experiencing gratitude. In fact, it is impossible. So, look for all the benefits that have come into your life since your failure and appreciate them. Be grateful for what you have earned or the opportunities you have.

Even if you fail, you likely still have all your basic needs met. You still have food, water, and a place to live in the majority of cases. What then do you have to worry about? Even if the worst should happen at any time and you “fail beyond repair”, you can still come back here. You can reach out to your friends, family, and church for help and they will lend you a hand. Our social structure is built so that we can support one another.

Other Source: Recover from failure – Resilience

How Failure is Like Inflammation (Failure Part 2.)

Failure can be likened to inflammation in the body. When the human body is damaged, it undergoes a process of inflammation to heal itself. This same basic inflammatory process happens whether you scratch your arm or break your leg. It consists of three processes that overlap one another.

The first component is the inflammatory stage.

This period lasts about a week during which the body is trying to stop bleeding, get repair materials to the injury site and fight infection if necessary. This is the stage that is the most painful, because it begins the moment an injury is sustained. The body is rapidly performing all the “damage control” processes it can in order to limit the extent of the damage.

The second stage of inflammation begins somewhere between the 6^th and 20^th day after the injury, though many experts disagree as to when this stage actually begins.

This second section of injury repair is called the proliferation stage.

Here the body is trying to repair the overall damage of the injury by building new blood vessels, build new tissue to replace what was lost or killed, shrinking the size of the wound, and covering it with a new layer of skin. Each of these four processes happen at the same time, it is a masterful renovation of the body. During this stage, the body is recovering in a broad sense, not really paying too much attention to detail but rather simply trying to restore the structural integrity of the injured tissue or body parts. In this stage, you can move the injured site around and even poke the injury, and while it still may be tender or painful, it is much better than it was during the first week.

The final stage of inflammation is called the maturation stage; this stage can last from months to years depending on the injury.

This is where the body is finished with the rough renovation of the injury and really starts focusing on the details. It tries to line up collagen and other cells nicely so that you look like you never injured yourself.

Now what could this possibly have to do with dealing with failure? Here is the answer: when we are hit with a failure as men, we go through an eerily similar process of recovery.

Recovering from Failure – The Steps

I. Inflammation Phase: The moments right after failing a test, performing poorly in a sport, or at work are some of the most painful moments you experience. You may find that your lower back and kidneys begin to hurt. Your head may start to spin, and you question your adequacy as a man and perhaps question if it is worth it to stay alive.

The most important action you can take at this moment is to avoid ruminating on the failure. Just like you put an icepack on a new injury to limit inflammation, you must put an icepack of sorts on your mind. You need to do anything you can to distract your mind and put it on a different loop. What you are trying to do is prevent your brain from replaying the failure over and over again and also prevent yourself from thinking about what you would have done differently.

You can derail your train of thought by training extremely hard, playing a game, or diving into your favorite distraction. You have to prevent yourself from ruminating. One failure is enough, there is no need to mentally relive it for the next hour; that is the source of the majority of stress in people’s minds.

This first action is the Damage Control Maneuver.

II. Proliferation Phase: If you scratch a chunk out of your arm, the body dutifully fills that hole. If you take a chunk out of your pride or self-esteem by failing, you must repair it the same way. At this point, the pain of the failure itself is leaving, though your pride may still be aching. In this period, you can begin to assess what went wrong with your performance in a rational, detached way. You will want to wait several days to begin this process if possible because the pain and emotions of the inflammatory stage make it impossible to be rational about your performance.

You must simultaneously repair your self-esteem by winning small successes in other life areas and reassess and prepare to go to war with your enemy – be it an exam, a project, or a speech. Once you have clearly located the gaps in your ability, attack them with ferocious force. You must train and practice far more than you did in your first attempt with the enemy. You must also put your mind in a superior position. If you go into the next project or exam already demoralized or defeated, you will get crushed. But if you go into the project with a fire in your eyes and the intense desire to annihilate that enemy, you will be victorious.

This second act of mass preparation is the Sword Sharpening Maneuver.

“The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.” ~Sun Tzu

III. Maturation Phase: This is the long-term recovery from failure where you integrate the lessons learned into your character and actually learn to become thankful for the failure. You learn some of the most important lessons of your life in failure from how to manage your immediate emotions, recover self-esteem, and become more intense in your work. Once those lessons are integrated into your character, you are more masculine, and the pain of failure is essentially gone. Perhaps you feel a few nagging aches every few weeks, but for the most part, you have completely recovered.

You complete this phase of healing by looking back on the failure while completely detached and free from the painful emotions of the first two phases. From this perspective, you can see all the ways your failure actually made you better, stronger, and more mentally prepared for your future.

This final action is the Reclaiming the Throne Maneuver.

As bad as failure feels at the time, what you will notice over time is that the more you attempt anything, the more you will fail. The more you fail, the shorter the inflammation of failure becomes. Your first major failure may take you two months to recover from. The next failure just 6 weeks. This will progress until you have accepted failure as a part of life, extract its benefits, and recover within a few days or even within a few hours if you are a master. Learn to manage and appreciate the inflammation of failure and you will undoubtedly be a great man.

You also need standards for your own personal failure, weather in your physical training in personal growth. Without standards and the reality of failure, we have no way to evaluate our performance. When we cannot evaluate our performance, we cannot know when we have failed. If we cannot know when we fail, we will not know when we need to improve. When we do not know if we need to improve, we will remain stagnant. Therefore, failure is a compass of character, it directs us towards who we want to be. A man must first decide who he wants to be before he can begin working on becoming that ideal.

“Those in athletic pursuit first chose the sport they want, and then do the work.” ~ Epictetus

Be willing to fail. Do not let the fear of failure prevent you from acting. Failure is a surefire path to growth and learning. And it comes at a fraction of the cost of a modern college education.

The next time you hit failure, try to rush being thankful for that failure. You just learned a lesson you will never forget. That alone makes failure a better teacher than any egghead in a classroom.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Conduct Yourselves like Men.

Reference: Epictetus, and Robert Dobbin. Discourses and Selected Writings. Penguin Books, 2008.

Failure

Failure is a surefire way to generate growth both of character and skill.

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
Psalm 73:26

At some point you come face to face with failure. Whether it manifests as a character flaw that affects your work or a sin does not matter. As a man, failing is difficult because of the massive egos we usually carry around. But failing is inevitable.

We should not be discouraged by failing, instead it should excite us. Because within that failure are the exact coordinates for where we need to go in order to improve. Failure is a performance evaluation for our character that lets us know precisely where we are insufficient. Failure points its bony fingers in the direction of improvement. Our failures show us that our study strategies or work ethic need improvement. Sexual failings tells us that our self-control needs refinement.

The weak men are discouraged. Boys wallow in their weakness and flaws like liberals. Weak men ignore their flaws and pretend they don’t exist like conservatives. Both cases are the result of a lack of masculinity.

Masculinity takes ownership of that failure. It claims every ounce of failure as its own. Masculinity takes full responsibility for the insufficiency it possesses. Ignore the weak, frail ego that pervades the Church and take ownership of your life. Have some ownership for your failures, and use them as a tool to improve.

No growth is possible without failure.

When I fail, I only grow.

Application

Don’t be discouraged by failing, instead use it. The best thing about failing is it gives you the blueprint for improvement. Failure is part of the recipe for success. All you have to do is avoid the ego trauma of the weak beta male, and turn that weakness and failure into strength and success.

To properly use failure, you first have to set clear parameters for both success and failure. You must clearly define the standards of success. Only by doing this will you know when you have failed.

Without standards, we have no way to evaluate our performance. When we cannot evaluate our performance, we cannot know when we have failed. If we cannot know when we fail, we will not know when we need to improve. When we don’t know if we need to improve, we will remain stagnant.

Accept the reality that you are insufficient in many areas.

This can be done by writing down who you want to be and comparing it to who you are now. Doing this shows us that we have much work to do. But it also shows us a path to success. A man must first decide who he wants to be before he can begin working on becoming that ideal. “Those in athletic pursuit first chose the sport they want, and then do the work” ~ Epictetus. (Read it for Free here)

Be willing to fail. Do not let fear of failing prevent you from taking action. Failure is a surefire path to growth and learning. And it comes at a fraction of the cost of a modern college education. Endure the pain of change.

The next time you fail, try to rush to being thankful for it. You just learned a lesson you will never forget. That alone makes failure a better teacher than any egg-head in a classroom.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.