How to Cope with Failure (And Coach Someone Through It)

How do you cope with failure? Start by getting specific. Most of us treat failure as a sweeping judgment on who we are, when it is usually one of three things: a problem with how we did something, a problem with the plan, or a problem with why we wanted it in the first place. Once you know which one you’re looking at, you have something to work with.

That’s the heart of this episode of the Everything Life Coaching podcast, recorded live at Coaching Mastery with Noelle Cordeaux, Head of Lumia.

Why failure feels so personal

We live in a culture that measures worth by achievement and accumulation. Noelle calls it “the show and tell of modern life”: the promotion, the new house, the job title we hand over at parties as a stand-in for who we are as a living, breathing human being. If we have nothing to show and tell, we assume we’re doing it wrong. Worse, we assume something is wrong with us.

Noelle points to Mia Birdsong’s book How We Show Up, which traces how we’ve been conditioned to believe we should pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. That belief is harmful, and it’s also an inaccurate picture of how adults change and grow.

Failure, pain, and mistakes don’t assign value to humans. They are part of being human.

The three kinds of failure

This framework comes from James Clear, and Noelle uses it to poke holes in the idea that failure says anything about a person’s value.

Failure of tactics is about the how. The goal is sound and the execution needs adjusting. Noelle’s example: you want to run a marathon, you don’t have the language to tell the shoe guy what you need, and you end up in hiking boots. You can recover from that.

Failure of strategy is about the plan. You know why and you know how, but the route from point A to point B needs revising, often more than once. Success often looks like a squiggly line, it’s almost never a straight path.

Failure of vision is about the why, and it’s where coaches need to be detectives. When something is inexplicably hard, there are usually three culprits: the goal belongs to somebody else, nobody evaluated the goal before chasing it, or the person hasn’t adapted as reality shifted around them.

Noelle offers herself as the example. She has started five graduate programs and finished none, including law school, where she went because the people around her said she should. “It turns out that law school is all rules,” she says, “and those are things that I do not like.”

What to say when someone is hurting

Watching another person in the pain of failure is hard. The impulse, for coaches and for everyone else, is to look away, minimize, or rush to make them feel better. Noelle suggests something closer to this:

“Hey, I know that this hurts like hell. And it is hard for me to see you suffering, but this doesn’t define you. It’s learning. And I look forward to hearing what you walk away with from this experience and what you do with this hard-won knowledge that you’re fighting for right now.”

Try it this week

Pick one thing you still file under “failed.” Ask whether it was the how, the plan, or the why. That question turns the dial from despair to evaluation, and evaluating without shame is a massive part of the coaching process.

For more on this topic, read Three Ways To Deal With Personal Failure.

Curious what it would take to do this work with clients of your own? See how Lumia’s coach training works.