Thomas Merton wrote “A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly”. But what does it actually mean to “fail well”?

Earlier this year I was sitting with the sting of failure and I was practicing dropping into my body to really pay attention to the physical sensations and thoughts that accompanied failure. I could feel a sort of defeated, heavy, hopeless, shame feeling when a memory popped into my head that I hadn’t thought about in years.

I was 19 or 20, at Magdalen College at Oxford University. I was busy being very bulimic (nobody knew), getting straight As, and building up a résumé in order to get more investment banking internships The Magdalen College Common Room was looking for a treasurer. I thought why not, it would be another string in my bow. So I made the required poster and thought of a tagline and wrote something like “100% Swiss, 100% neutral”. I guess I was trying to channel a sense of dependable accounting or whatever a treasurer is meant to be (I’ve never been one, and yes I did just google “what exactly is a treasurer”?)

Anyway, I don’t remember much of what followed. I remember a scene in the college computer room where I saw one of the posters on the wall with the words “Nazi gold” scrawled on it. I remember feeling humiliated and embarrassed. Of course Switzerland wasn’t neutral in many ways, I knew that, what was I thinking?  It felt mortifying. I remember a concerned Porter (Porters were the lovely elderly gentleman who helped with everything from directing tourists around the college to making sure students got their mail) telling me how disturbed he was that the posters had been defaced. I can’t remember if he took down the posters or I did. But I do remember just pretending the whole thing never happened. Not talking about it. Burying and ignoring the shame and just “moving on.”

I think it’s an excellent example of “failing badly” where we learn nothing from an experience but just feel scarred by it. The fact that it popped up so many decades later speaks to the way these experiences get etched into our bodies if we don’t find a way of processing them at the time. I still don’t love the vulnerable feeling of putting myself out there, or failing or looking foolish, but these days I’m more committed to what I think of as “failing consciously”. Often there’s such a thick layer of shame or humiliation or self hate that we don’t slow down and experience failure. 

Why It’s So Important To Learn To Fail Consciously

We’re desperate to skip the moment, cover up any evidence and move on to fairer pastures. But that strategy just doesn’t work, especially when we’re trying to make real change with very ingrained patterns, habits or addictions. In my Binge Free course (you can find the free video training here) one of the eight modules is called “Mindful Failing”. And that’s because I know the #1 reason people don’t make progress is because of the nearly universal tendency to check out when “things go wrong.” When in fact there needs to be a huge focus on that moment where we’re essentially “failing”. Our ability to be curious, and be kind to ourselves, will transform the outcome even if we’re not objectively successful (yet) with whatever we’re trying to achieve.

A concrete example of how this shows up in psychotherapy sessions is when clients are reluctant to talk about their mis-steps – they don’t want to focus on the Tuesday night binge, the four times they shouted at their kids or the fact they didn’t do the important work task they said they would. They want to gloss over that and focus on their new plan – their spreadsheet with their new exercise regime, their new diet, their strategy to tackle the scary work stuff they’ve been avoiding etc. When they don’t execute on the plan, they prefer to channel energy into a better plan the next week. The irony is that the information that’s really helpful is in the moment of “failing” to execute on the plan. The useful information lies in the specific thoughts and physical sensations that make it hard to do (or in some cases not do) something. Once you’ve pieced those together progress is much more doable because you know the exact thought loops and sensations you’ll need to navigate to move forward.