My 5 point template to deal with failure.

The cool shades of the Drone’s club, the rustle of leaves, the waft of very strong Coffee and Golibhajje. This is the right time to contemplate.Actually Siddaramaiyya Bellad and his wife Sarasvati (Sid and Sara to you and me) had got me into this thing called Landmark Forum, a place where seasoned coaches would pull out the roaches from the deep hidden annals of your forgotten inner self, air it, and let go back to that blissful state of being unperturbed with happenings outside, with the gratifying knowledge that you have done your best and are now a better version of yourself.One of the exercises we had there was to ask 10 people to share what they think is the best trait in you. When in Rome do as the Romans do… I put the Bolo on that one and the majority of my friends and family seem to think when it comes to bouncing back I could give the rubber ball a run for its money, mind you not a boomerang.By this time my second coffee had hit and the spirit of that fellow Socrates must have seeped in, I kind of contemplated … Here is an excerpt from that internal conversation.“How do I deal with failure or disappointment?”“What do you mean by failure or disappointment?”“I dunno.”“What does Merriam-Webster say?”“About failure… ” my conscious mind needed to ponder,”omission of occurrence or performance, lack of success, falling short.”“What about disappointment?”“It is failure to meet a hope or expectation.”As this conversation was going on, for some unearthly reason I remembered a priest telling us about snakes, how the deforestation and construction work has confused the snake, their paths are blocked and destinations inaccessible. Many snakes have perished because they do not know how to find their way to their destination, while many snakes survived because they could navigate through a new path.It was a like a thunderbolt…without the third shot of coffee…I had an epiphany that is what disappointment or failure meant to me… not reaching my destination and what I did was to find the new path.Let’s be honest, at that moment I was only fit for the loony Dr.Glossop’s diagnosis of “Denial”. According to him, there are stages like denial…Anger of course; in my teenage years I have planned elaborate execution procedures on people who got better of me.Bargaining…I shall light 12 candles at mother of all sorrows if I can sit on my butt with out it hurting.Depression… the sun will never shine again since the love of my life has gone away.Acceptance…I think Dr. Glossop has taken a franchise on this — he doles it out for handling grief and what not — but we being groomed at the Drone’s club acknowledge that failure and disappointment are matters of grief. Each of those have been effected only when I took the next step…this was handed down to me by my immediate ancestor, my grandmother … she would brew me a great cuppa of Theobroma. I think she put in a drop of brandy and let me sleep it over next morning. She had a ritual called “Stock taking” which began with putting down on paper:What is the result I am looking at?What is the current state?What have I done that has worked?What are the other options?Take that step right away.Somehow the process of grieving, shedding tears, venting my anger, would drain me, and it was as if the hot chocolate triggered the rejuvenation and I am back navigating.And sometimes during the candid stock taking the truth hits you: your destination is warped.

This is written for Indispire#187

 

 

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