This is my Failure Resume

A few years ago, my team at Inventium completed a strengths finder assessment. I expected my report to tell me that my top strength was something like ‘time optimisation’ (as a similar test had revealed many years ago) or ‘creativity’ - or some other skill that I utilise every day. But no, apparently my number one strength was ‘competitiveness’ (although this would come as no surprise to anyone who has played Settlers of Catan against me).

My first memories of being competitive are from primary school. But in addition to being competitive, I was also a perfectionist.

If an essay came back with an A, I would feel disappointed that the ‘plus’ was missing. If I wasn’t the first to finish a maths quiz, I would question my numerical ability. If I didn’t top the class in all academic assignments, I would feel like a failure.

In primary school, Bonnie Smart was my arch-nemesis. She lived up to her name. I felt like we were the only two people who existed in our class, and whenever she beat me, I felt devastated.

While the mix of perfectionism and competitiveness can be a winning combination for career progression (not to mention getting good grades at school), it’s not great for dealing with failure and setbacks.

Growing up, I prided myself on winning and being successful. Failure was not part of my self-identity. I was used to succeeding at anything I put my mind to. Which of course means that when failure does arrive, it hits you hard.

My natural inclination was to hide my failures. My failures embarrassed me because I thought they meant I was a lesser person. If other people knew about my failures, surely their positive impressions of me would be destroyed?

Through my work at behavioural science consultancy Inventium, I see plenty of people struggle with failure - wanting to hide it, punish it, deny it. No good can come of this.

The best way to learn is to fail.

And when we start to talk about our failures openly, rather than repress them, we actually increase our resilience.

Harvard Psychology Professor Daniel Wegner coined the term Ironic Mental Processes, through a series of experiments. He found that when individuals try to suppress certain thoughts and emotions, they resurface more intensely than before. For example, Psychology Professor Jennifer Borton and her colleagues found that when we ignore doubts about ourselves, self-esteem declines and anxiety rises.

Wegner argued that we need to stop suppressing negative thoughts and emotions, and instead, express them. Ironically, doing so should increase resilience and self-belief.

This is where a Failure Resume comes into play.

I first wrote my Failure Resume as part of an experiment in 2020. But now, as we head towards the finish line of 2021, I’ve revisited it and am sharing a new version (with trepidation) once more. I challenged myself to be more raw, more open, and pick some even more devastating (and recent) failures.

Here are five big ones from the last few years. I’d love to see yours if you’re game.

Linking my achievements to my self-worth (1984-present)

You don’t have to be a psychologist to recognise that I had a serious case of achievement-derived self-worth (this is not a psychological proper term, but it sounds like it could be). Whenever I would accomplish something new, I felt (and still feel) the strong urge to tell other people (lots of people) about what I have just done. I tell them not to brag, but because I believe it will make them like me more. And as someone who cares too much about what others think, I really want people to like me as much as possible. Writing this down, I can obviously see how flawed this reasoning is. But I still do it.

What I learnt:

A couple of years ago, I read a Seth Godin blog that said, “Confidence is a choice, not a symptom”. It dawned on me that I didn’t need to achieve certain things to feel confident and worthwhile, especially in my work life.

And while I’m making progress on this ‘failure’, it’s been slow. It’s hard to change something that has been hard-wired for decades. But here is some evidence of change – I went for a walk with a close friend on the weekend. He asked how I was doing. I said “relieved” because I’d just submitted the first draft of my book to my publisher. All 72,000 words. His response was, “What book?” I had completely failed (not consciously) to mention that I had been offered a book deal with Penguin six months prior. Winning! (Although sharing this win feels like I have missed the point of this learning).

Not having the courage to leave my marriage sooner (2019)

On August 25, 2019, I left my partner of 13 years. No big event had precipitated the decision. There were no affairs, no abuse, nothing especially newsworthy. It was just a gradual realisation that we were not particularly compatible as human beings. The most devastating part of this decision was becoming a single mother and now only seeing my daughter half of the time. While to my friends and family, the decision seemed sudden, it was years in the making. But fear kept me in a sub-optimal relationship for years past its due date. Two years out, I can say with certainty that I’m far happier on this side of the fence.

What I learnt:

Being scared to do something that feels really big is not a good enough reason to not do it. The scariest and hardest decisions can often be the most rewarding. Also, while I stayed for longer than I should have because of my daughter Frankie, role modelling a sub-standard relationship to your children is not helpful role modelling.

Wearing a mask to work (2019-2021)

If you read the above, and perhaps if you have been through a similar situation, you’ll know that the first couple of years out of a marriage can be very rough, with everything there is to navigate and separate.

My default setting is to be open with my team, but during this time, I felt the need to hide my stress from my workmates and keep it to myself. I didn't want to be a burden or bring the mood down.

In some instances, it created unnecessary distance between me and my teammates. And there were many days where it was beyond exhausting to maintain an “I'm totally okay” facade, when I really wasn't.

What I learnt:

Looking back, I question the cost of not being truly ‘real’ about what I was experiencing outside of work. I felt protective of my team and didn’t want to ‘dump’ my stress onto them, but going to the other extreme where I tried to make light of what were some really heavy things I was going through probably wasn’t super healthy either.

I’d like to think that in the future, I would (and could) drop the mask and show up 100% as me. And by doing so, I suspect my own mental health, and my relationships with my team, would be all the better for it.

(I should add that seeking support from a brilliant clinical psychologist was critical for making it through this time. I saw him weekly during the hardest times, and I still see him once a fortnight).

Concealing my miscarriage from my Inventium team (2013)

When I was 18, I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). PCOS is one of the leading causes of infertility, so I never assumed I would be able to have children, even though I was sure I wanted to have one during this lifetime. When I fell pregnant (easily) in early 2013, I was beside myself with joy. In the nine weeks my body spent growing a little person, I spent hundreds of hours imagining the life that this yet-to-be-born human would have.

When we went for a scan at nine weeks, the Obstetrician told us that the foetus had stopped growing several weeks ago. Two days later, I went in for a D&C to have this little person removed from my body. The grief hit me like a landslide but because no one at work knew I was even pregnant, I went straight back into the office as if nothing had happened.

What I learnt:

Hiding something as life-shattering as a miscarriage helps no one. I have since talked openly about it with my team on various occasions and hope that doing so normalises the experience so we no longer have to feel shame about it and hide our grief to people with whom we spend so much time.

Putting unrealistic expectations on myself in my role as a mum (2014-present)

In February 2014, my daughter Frankie came into the world. My life and priorities shifted enormously, as most of my energy pre-Frankie had been poured into my work.

A couple of years into this new role, I became more aware of the expectations I placed on myself as a mother. Because I was a working mum, I felt I needed to overcompensate whenever I was with Frankie.

The unwritten rule I had was that I had to be 100% present and interacting with her 100% of the time.

It was exhausting. And I was constantly falling short of this expectation and beating myself up about it. If I took my daughter to a cafe for breakfast and I spent a couple of minutes having a quick read of the weekend newspaper, I would immediately tell myself off and redirect my full attention back to Frankie. I identified with being an overachiever in my working life, and naturally, this expectation transferred itself to motherhood.

I always felt like I could be doing a better job, paying more attention, coming up with more stimulating activities, and baking better cakes (just kidding on that last one – I don’t bake). And when I did direct my attention somewhere other than Frankie such as into reading the weekend paper, I would feel guilty for the pleasure this gave me. Because surely the most pleasurable activity, when you are a parent, is spending quality time with your children All The Time?

It took me another few years, in a conversation with my therapist, to realise that this behaviour was not normal. In schema therapy, I score high on “unrelenting standards”. This is defined as “the underlying belief that one must strive to meet very high internalised standards of behaviour and performance, usually to avoid criticism.” Easy to diagnose, harder to change.

What I learnt:

I know I can have ridiculously high standards for my work, but I was completely unaware that these standards were also imposing themselves on my role as a mum. Over the years, and at least on some days, I have slowly started to relax the expectations I have of myself as a mother. I now sometimes allow myself to ‘do my own thing’ while Frankie does hers.

As I write this, though, I worry that this may make me sound like a bad mother. I worry that I will be judged by other mothers who are 100% present for their children 100% of the time (I’m sure they exist, don’t they?). And I find it really hard to balance my overwhelming need to be the Best Mum in the World with also being kind to myself (which doesn’t come naturally).

It’s a constant battle, but one in which I think I’m making progress. Slowly.

And in spite of all of this, surprise, surprise, Frankie is still thriving.

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This article was written as part of the LinkedIn #Changemakers campaign – a campaign shining a spotlight on individuals using LinkedIn to drive genuine change in the world of work. To find out more about the partnership, read more here.