It interrupts without permission, scares without care and shuts you down right when you up.
I remain tied to the belief that the basic fear of failure is much worse than actually trying and failing.
But, as I have previously stated and as you all know, failing forward is good stuff. But if failing forward is indeed good, we need to show them how to do it and why it’s good. When we do this, we help our kid’s power through times of doubt and self-recrimination.
So, rather than using generalities to blanket all students and their ability, I came up with the following four categories.
1. Success-Oriented Students:
These are the students who love learning for the sake of learning and see failure as a way to improve their ability rather than a slight on their value as a human being. Obviously, many students tend to have parents who praise success and rarely, if ever, reprimand failure.
2. Overstrivers:
These students are what I consider the “closet-achievers.” They avoid failure by succeeding—but only with herculean effort motivated solely by the fear that even one failure will confirm their greatest fear: that they’re not perfect.
Because the fear of failure is so overpowering and because they doubt their abilities, Overstrivers will, on occasion, tell everyone that they have very little time to prepare for an upcoming test—and then spend the entire night studying. When they pass the test with flying colors, this “shows” everyone that they are brilliant because their “ability” trumped the need to extend any effort.
3. Failure-avoiding:
These students don’t expect to succeed—they just want to avoid failing. They believe that if they extend a lot of effort but still fail, then this implies low ability and hence, low worth. But if they don’t try and still fail, this will not reflect negatively on their ability and their worth remains intact.
In order to avoid failure that might be due to lack of ability, they do things such as make excuses (the dog ate my homework), procrastinate, don’t participate, and choose near-impossible tasks.
However, this can put them into a tricky position when they encounter a teacher who rewards effort and punishes for what appears to be lack of effort or worse. Ultimately, there’s no way out for these students—either they try and fail or they’re punished.
4. Failure-accepting:
These are the hardest students to motivate because they’ve internalized failure—they believe their repeated failures are due to lack of ability and have given up on trying to succeed and thus maintain their self-worth. Any success they might experience they ascribe to circumstances outside their control such as the teacher giving them the easiest task in a group project.
Two more points: Both failure-avoiding and failure-accepting students tend to focus on non-academic areas where they can succeed, such as sports or art or even risky behavior.
And students who, in general, are motivated by fear of failure tend to have parents who rarely praise success, and instead punish failure. This leads these students to believe that their parents’ love is conditioned upon their academic success.
Understanding how the complexity of the fear of failure can lead some students to succeed in school and others to give up makes it evident that telling students to “buck-up and deal” when the going gets tough won’t work for many or most of them.
The fear of failing is as paralyzing. Beating it down is pure joy.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Marketing. He can be reached at 305-788-4105 or via email ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
