Not Acknowledging Failure in Law School, is a Failure

There’s a lot of sensitivity around the f-word lately.

Failure.  

You either loathe or don't mind the word.  I fall on the latter side.  When I fail to achieve something, I call it what it is: a failure to achieve [anything I missed the mark in achieving].  

In my experience, a lot of people who loathe the word often attach the concept of failing to achieve a goal to them being human failures.  But that's not true.  

It simply means that we did not achieve a successful result to something we attempted.  That's the topic of this article.  

I’ve coached hundreds of students who were academically dismissed from law school for failing to meet their law school’s GPA standard and thousands of other students who, at some point, failed to meet their own standards.

So much so that I start coaching sessions with the calm statement, “I am sorry you failed to achieve [the school's standard] or [your goal]. That must be hard. Do you want to talk about what happened?"

Addressing the failure puts the student at ease because they do not have to tiptoe around a problem they are experiencing. They are instead free to unleash the feelings attached to their failure.

We all know the narrative that failure has the potential to lead to greatness.

The reason failure leads to greatness though, is because the person who failed, acknowledged the failure, got back up and took some new action that changed the trajectory of their experience, which led them to a different result (achieving their goal or steps closer to achieving their goal).

If we don’t acknowledge that we are failing, we will never develop a new plan to achieve the goal. Instead, we will continue down the same trajectory, spinning our wheels.

Acknowledge your failure.  Embrace it.  

If you are failing to achieve something in law school, here are some actionable steps you can take to achieve your goal:

1. Acknowledge and accept that you failed to achieve a personal or external goal or standard.
2. Let yourself feel your body's natural reaction to the failure. Sit in it.
3. Give yourself a deadline to experience your feelings.
4. When the deadline is up, assess why you failed.
5. Seek advice from loved ones, experts, other students, professors, and deans to see if they agree or disagree with your assessment and whether they have any insight on how to create a new plan to achieve the same goal.
6. Create and execute the new plan.

Notice how none of the action steps involve blaming, shaming or perceiving yourself as a failure?

You're not a failure.

You just failed to achieve something, like the rest of us. Welcome to the club of life!