Greetings from the Last Homely House! On Friday we had a gentle snow of big, fat flakes that only accumulated a few inches. Most of it was gone by today (Sunday). But I went out for a walk in the woods to enjoy the snow fall and got the above shot overlooking the upper portion of the Oyster River where UNH dams it up for its water supply (I kayak on the lower portion of the Oyster River all the time - that’s where most of my pictures come from). There is nothing quite like being in the woods during a snow storm. It brings to mind Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening -
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
I was working on a different topic for today’s newsletter, but I heard this interesting podcast on Harvard Business Review’s Ideacast, the title was “Sad, Mad, Anxious? How to Work Through Your ‘Big Feelings’”. and it made me change directions. The section that struck me had to do with dealing with a sense of hopelessness when you are failing at something. It comes at about 18:18 in the recording. This is from the transcript:
[O]ne of the mantras that we love is I am a person who is learning blank. And that just reminds us, I don’t have to have all the answers right now. We’re all working through unprecedented times. And so let’s stop beating ourselves up for feeling anxious or not knowing what’s going to come next. So instead of saying, I don’t know how to manage people. I can’t do this. You might say, I’m learning how to be a great manager in a hybrid work environment. Or you might say, I’m such a bad parent during COVID. And you might say, I’m learning how to care for an infant and transition into taking care of an infant during COVID. And that helps us adopt a growth mindset.
I thought this was fantastic advice. There have been many times when I have faced professional and personal obstacles where I felt like a failure because I could not complete a task or get the result I had imagined. Failure is part of the learning process. Using this mantra, “I am a person who is learning _________” gives you the ability to separate your identity from the failed attempt. You attempted something and failed; you are not yourself a failure. If anything, attempting something hard, that you don’t know how to do, is admirable. So better self-talk would be, “I am a person learning __________, and that is admirable.”
Something the podcast doesn’t talk about is actually following through with the learning. I think the key with self-talk like this is to actually follow through with the learning. It’s ok to fail at something hard and important and frame that failure as learning if you then actually try to learn from your mistakes. Reframing failure as learning helps separate your identity from the failure if you try to improve. You move from being a completed thing - a failure - to a thing in progress - a person learning.
There are days when I am teaching that I make mistakes in the classroom. If you teach quantitative material, sooner or later you are going to screw something up in front of a classroom and realize you don’t know what you did wrong and you can’t explain it. It’s one of the worst feelings. When this happens to me (it’s happened a handful of times), your anxiety starts to skyrocket, you feel your face getting red, and you feel all of the eyes of the students on you, and you know every one of them is thinking, “Who hired this fool?” And that is not a great state of mind for trying to figure out what you did wrong in a math problem or proof or financial statement. And all the while your inner critic is saying, indeed, who did hire this fool? But the best response to such a humiliating failure is to better prepare for the next time. One of my former colleagues who also teaches finance told me he never goes into a classroom without all of his examples worked out in advance. That’s something I have tried to remember to do now, and it has helped prevent these moments. But I still make mistakes every now and then because sometimes the brain just decides to forget something, and I try to learn from those mistakes by being better prepared.
Anyone who writes academic papers for journals has faced rejection. The above advice is the best way to take such rejections. It’s best not to get angry that a journal has not found value in the paper you spent two years gathering data for, and six months analyzing and three more months writing. It’s best to say, “I am a person who is learning to write better papers” and take the comments from the editor and learn.
I also have have plenty of failures as a leader that I could talk about. And on a the personal side, plenty of failures as a father (wow - parenthood presents a whole new way to feel inadequate), plenty as a husband, and honestly plenty as a friend, son, etc. Sometimes I can be philosophical about my failures, and sometimes I spend a lot of time lying in bed, awake, wondering about my life choices. But I really like this phrasing, “I am a person learning __________, and that is admirable.” I think maybe if I can remember to adopt that mantra, I’ll sleep better at night in the future. But the key is to follow through with the learning.
Ok, that’s it from me. As usual, willing good for all of you. I’ll be back Wednesday with a links post.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next week!
Mark
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picaso