Closely related to this is the issue where people try to do something, fail, and figure that they will “try harder” the next time. Frequently this just means that they will fail again, because their understanding of what they are doing wrong isn’t sufficiently gears-level to allow them to isolate the bug in question; “I will try harder” tends to mean “I don’t know why exactly I failed, so I’ll just try again and hope that it works this time around”.
I did some peer coaching at one point, and a common thing was that one of us would make a plan in order to do Y; a week later, the plan had failed and Y remained undone. The one doing the coaching would then ask what went wrong and how the other person could fix that failure, producing a revised plan for next week. Often, drilling down would produce something specific, such as “I had planned to get exercise by going out on a run, but then I was busy on a few days and it rained on the rest”. Then you could ask yourself what kind of a plan would avoid those failure modes, and generate a less fragile approach.
That makes “why do I keep having this problem” and “what have I tried before and why hasn’t it worked” very useful questions, and might help reframe failure not as failure, but as progress towards solving the goal. Yes, you didn’t succeed at the goal right away, but you got more information about what works and what doesn’t, making you better-positioned to solve it the next time around.
This is also good to combine with Murphyjitsu—after forming a new plan, imagining that plan to have failed and asking yourself how surprising that possibility would feel. If it wouldn’t feel very surprising at all, ask your brain what it expects the failure to have been caused by, and plan around that.
It’s also worth noting that sometimes you go through a few iterations of this and new bugs just keep popping up, or alternatively it feels like you can’t imagine anything in particular that would go wrong, but your inner simulator still expects this to fail. That might point to there being some emotional issue, such as your brain predicting that success will be dangerous for some reason. That’s then another thing that you can try to tackle.
Closely related to this is the issue where people try to do something, fail, and figure that they will “try harder” the next time. Frequently this just means that they will fail again, because their understanding of what they are doing wrong isn’t sufficiently gears-level to allow them to isolate the bug in question; “I will try harder” tends to mean “I don’t know why exactly I failed, so I’ll just try again and hope that it works this time around”.
I did some peer coaching at one point, and a common thing was that one of us would make a plan in order to do Y; a week later, the plan had failed and Y remained undone. The one doing the coaching would then ask what went wrong and how the other person could fix that failure, producing a revised plan for next week. Often, drilling down would produce something specific, such as “I had planned to get exercise by going out on a run, but then I was busy on a few days and it rained on the rest”. Then you could ask yourself what kind of a plan would avoid those failure modes, and generate a less fragile approach.
That makes “why do I keep having this problem” and “what have I tried before and why hasn’t it worked” very useful questions, and might help reframe failure not as failure, but as progress towards solving the goal. Yes, you didn’t succeed at the goal right away, but you got more information about what works and what doesn’t, making you better-positioned to solve it the next time around.
This is also good to combine with Murphyjitsu—after forming a new plan, imagining that plan to have failed and asking yourself how surprising that possibility would feel. If it wouldn’t feel very surprising at all, ask your brain what it expects the failure to have been caused by, and plan around that.
It’s also worth noting that sometimes you go through a few iterations of this and new bugs just keep popping up, or alternatively it feels like you can’t imagine anything in particular that would go wrong, but your inner simulator still expects this to fail. That might point to there being some emotional issue, such as your brain predicting that success will be dangerous for some reason. That’s then another thing that you can try to tackle.