Failure Into Feedback

“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” - Bruce Lee

Among one of the things we believe is that there is no failure, only feedback. That is, every mistake we make brings us 1 step closer to succeeding. Instead of letting our mistakes convince us that we are failures and fail at everything we do - and therefore will do - we choose to see those "failures" as actually being helpful to attaining our goals. Our setbacks simply serve to provide us with more information; information that we may not have acquired if we hadn't "failed." So with this we say there is no failure, only feedback. It is one of the core presuppositions of NLP.

I personally have been wrong countless times, and have failed more times than I care to think about, but every single "failure" or mistake has been invaluable to being right, or rather, to learning, because I'm still always open to being wrong and failures, because I know that those are stepping stones to being better, more knowledgeable and more effective.

"You can only get smarter by playing a smarter opponent." 

Which means that failure is inevitable on the quest for growth and success, but you can change how you perceive those failures.

Failing over and over again and then succeeding is like finding a diamond in the dirt. Lest we forget where diamonds come from...

Failure Into Feedback Strategy

Another variation of this is the notion that "there are no mistakes, there are only outcomes." The implication of these statements is that the results of our attempts to reach our goals may be interpreted in different ways.

Depending upon the nature of a particular outcome, it may take more or less effort to accomplish a particular goal. In many instances, our ultimate success is not a function of immediate results; it is a function of an ongoing feedback loop. Sometimes you even need to do something that you know probably won't work in order to get the feedback necessary to progress.

A good illustration of this is the example of an inventor who had developed a very complex three dimensional imaging device. It had taken him years to complete it, and he had made many versions that had not worked. During an interview he was asked, "How did you manage to deal with all of the failures you encountered along the way?" Initially the inventor appeared confused by the question.
Finally he said, "I guess I didn't consider them failures. I just figured they were a solution to a problem other than the one I was working on at the time." And, in fact, something that hadn't worked at one stage in the development of the device, was often a legitimate solution at another stage.

Another example is that of the man who invented xerography, Chester Carlson. In an interview he said that at several points he had to make a machine that he knew would not work in order to get the feedback he needed to know what to do next. You might say he had to make a 'grander failure' than the earlier version.

Yet, while most of us may agree that it is better to interpret lack of success as "feedback" rather than "failure," changing our feelings about an unsuccessful situation is "easier said than done." The Failure Into Feedback Strategy is a process that uses the NLP concepts of 'Synesthesia' and 'accessing cues' to help transform experiences of failure into productive learning experiences. It was developed to address limiting beliefs about capabilities. An assumption of the process is that a "belief" is more than a particular representation of an experience. Rather, it is a synesthesia, or "synthesis," of several representations which form a kind of "molecule" of experience. In order for us to form a belief about an experience, we must not only, say, visually remember the external details of an event, but also have feelings, and/or self talk, mental fantasies, recalled messages from others, etc., attached to the memory.

When these various forms of representations are detached from one another and considered in their elemental state, they do not have any particular "meaning." The words, "Be careful," for instance, are just words until we associate them with feelings and images. If we connect those words to a feeling of anxiety and a remembered image of a situation in which we failed to achieve a desired outcome, they may form the core of a belief "molecule" relating to avoidance. If, on the other hand, we add to this "molecule" a fantasized image of the desired goal and put in the additional words, "Be careful...and be wise, and you'll make it OK," and the meaning of the molecule is transformed. The anxiety may shift to being more of a sense of anticipation and alertness that helps us to approach our desired state rather than avoid failure.

The Failure Into Feedback Strategy offers a method to identify and "break up" limiting "molecules" of experience, and then to enrich and reassemble the cluster of experiences into a more useful and appropriate model of a situation.

How 5 Billionaires Had To Fail To Succeed

Going back to Doublethink: If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.

It is directly connected to Best Case Scenario Outcomes in Meta Programs. That is, looking at all that happens in a positive way, and refraining from dwelling on negative happenings.

Choice is better than no choice in regard to Meta Programs. A person's health, happiness and effectiveness are greatly enhanced by the ability to have full access to either Meta Program according to what a person considers appropriate and useful in a given context.

Many successful and generally happy people find that a good model for balance between these two Meta Programs is something along the lines of, "Dream and plan for the best, be prepared for the worst." Given the ability to access and use both Meta Programs with a default of "Best Case Scenario" and attendant healthy beliefs about possibility and capability, the NLP Disney planning process is an excellent way to balance and contextualize both types of thinking for many desired outcomes.

"If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring." - James Baldwin 

And like Away From thinking, Worst Case thinking can be an important capability if specific worst cases are realistically assessed and can be adequately planned for. In some cases, worst case thinking is like a sort of reverse optimism. That is, if we know we can handle the worst case, anything better that happens will be "gravy." Murphy's Law "If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong," is an example of this Meta Program. It's often cited with a certain wry humor, the benefit of which is that a person may plan more precisely to handle contingencies which may obstruct or interrupt the achievement of goals.

“People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.” - James Baldwin

Failure is knowledge; knowledge is power.

The person with the most flexibility in a system will have the most influence.

This is the Law of requisite variety from systems theory. This means the person with the most options and behavioral choices will control the system. In any field, the top people in that field are those who have the most variety in their behavior. They have choices of behavior that their colleagues don’t.

Any time you limit your behavioral choices you give others the competitive edge. If you are able to respond to any situation in a variety of ways, you are more likely to get your outcome.

The choice is yours.

Fear Nothing!