Avoiding the pain of failure

I just had to check in two books that I’ve had for over a year and still haven’t finished reading! (or even tried reading for over a year!) I do this thing where I check out books on subjects that I’m interested in and I think that’s all I have to do. I don’t have to actually read them…Oh, no…I can get to the books' contents just by being near them—ha!

Anyway, one of the books is called Impro: Improvisation and the theater by Keith Johnstone (London: Faber and Faber, 1979). I read about it on one of the finance blogs I read, either Grow Rich Slowly or The Simple Dollar. The blog writer suggested the book for those of us who are socially inept through fear, self-consciousness, or by living too much inside our heads.

As I started reading it again this week an “aha!” moment hit me when I read Johnstone’s description of trying to get improv students to stop trying to control their own experience. He says that students who are afraid to fail have a tendency to try to get around having to do something instead of finding a way to do the thing they’re afraid to do. Johnstone calls this “avoiding the pain of failure” (p.31). He's observed two ways students try to avoid the pain: doing something half-heartedly in an attempt to gain sympathy in advance for failure, and ignoring what’s happening at the moment to try to anticipate and control their performance in the future.

I do both of these things all the time. I never realized that what I was doing was a kind of backwards coping strategy. I’ve written in my journal recently about how I tried to cope with working full time, going to library school and dealing with family problems by vegging out and watching movies all the time instead of doing my work. I really need to work out some better strategies for dealing with the challenges in my life.

Johnstone writes that he tells students that he, the teacher, is responsible for their success.

“In exchange for accepting the blame for failure, I ask the students to set themselves up in such a way that they’ll learn as quickly as possible. I’m teaching spontaneity, and therefore I tell them that they mustn’t try to control the future, or to ‘win’; and that they’re to have an empty head and just watch. When it’s their turn to take part they’re to come out and just do what they’re asked to, and see what happens. It’s this decision not to try and control the future which allows the students to be spontaneous. (p. 32).