The Gritty View Of Failure
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What does failure mean to you?
It's a question I like to ask my coaching clients. And often, the answer is gloomy.
"The opposite of success." "Letting someone down." "Not meeting a goal."
A more helpful answer may come from the work of University of Pennsylvania psychology researcher Angela Duckworth, who has concluded that stick-to-itiveness, or grit, is more important than talent in reaching success. Duckworth believes that for the gritty person, failure is an opportunity to learn and try again and that success is more akin to a marathon than a sprint.
In this recent Ted Talk, she explains how grit works in the context of education.
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But What If You Get Sidetracked?
You may see yourself as a gritty person but still find yourself sidetracked on the way to your goals.
How to overcome this? Francesca Gino, a Harvard business school professor, offers strategies in her new book Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed and How We Can Stick To The Plan.
Among her strategies for staying with it are becoming aware of our self-defeating tendencies - for example, assuming we're experts when we really should ask for advice, letting ourselves be influenced by vanity, ambition and peer pressure, and losing sight of our own moral compass.
Could any of these factors be getting in your way? An honest romp through Gino's book might help.
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Fill Someone's Gratitude Bucket
 Tired of those self-serving posts on Facebook?
You may be ready for a FB alternative called the Gratitude Bucket. Created by positive psychology expert Zack Prager, the site lets you create an online bucket to post a picture of someone for whom you're grateful and list the reasons why.
You can then invite others to express their gratitude to this person as well.
So go ahead. Create a bucket on this very cool site, and reap all the physical and psychological benefits that the powerful positive emotion of gratitude has to offer.
Copyright 2013 Pat Snyder
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