[00:03] Jason: Welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast.
[00:06] Debbie: We’re here to bring you helpful information from leading experts and give you effective tools and support. I’m Jason Grygla, a licensed counselor and founder of Techie for Life, a specialized mentoring program for neurodiverse young adults.
[00:19] Jason: And I’m Debbie Grygla, a certified life coach. And maybe most importantly, we’re also parents to our own atypical Young Adults.
[00:30]
Friends. Hello. Welcome. So today I want to talk to you about how to fail for success. So if you have and you want your autistic or neurodivergent child teen or young adult to not fail, meaning you want them to succeed, you want them to be able to reach their goals and to develop to their full capacity and be who they want to be in the world. You’re actually going to want to teach and model how to fail, the right way to fail, the useful way to fail, meaning how to use fails so that they actually can succeed.
Our students at Techie for Life are our program for neurodivergent and adults where we help them with their next steps on their educational career path, our TfL students that get good at failing are actually the ones who succeed and who can keep on succeeding through setbacks. The ones that don’t learn how to fail, they continue to stay stuck until they learn how to do it. And it’s so important that it’s even more important than, let’s say they come and they get some easy wins and some easy successes. They’re not going to be able to maintain that unless they can actually learn how to fail. So it’s critical that they learn how to do it.
So there’s some things I want you to understand about fails. One, our fails are not about us. Your fails are not about you, your autistic or neurodivergent child, teen or young adult. Their fails are not about them. Fails are about what you tried that didn’t work, what your young adult tried or your child tried or your teen tried or you tried.
As a parent, fails are about what we tried that didn’t work. They have no bearing, no reflection. They are not about our intrinsic value or worth or even our capabilities. So don’t use your fails against yourself. And we want to encourage our young people to not use their fails against themselves. That is just reinforcing shame based thoughts, stories, and beliefs about ourselves. And when we continue to shame ourselves, shaming ourselves does not help us succeed.
Two, not trying because you might fail is just failing ahead of time. So we can have a negative emotion if we fail. You might feel disappointed or discouraged or frustrated, okay? But if we don’t even try, we’re also going to feel negative emotions. We’re going to feel the same, even maybe disappointed or discouraged. Either way, there’s negative emotions whether you try or you don’t try. But at least with trying, you have a chance at succeeding. Not trying is just failing ahead of time, and it guarantees failure. And when we don’t even try, we miss out on the development and the experience and the things that we learn through trying.
So giving up, just shuts it down. There’s like no learning, no growth, no anything that can happen. We just quit. And we feel terrible because we didn’t do the things that we wanted to do. But if we’re willing to try and fail, even in that fail, there’s success in the fact that we had that experience. We learned what didn’t work. We put ourselves out there. You develop as a person when you try things, whether you succeed at them or not. And then the third thing that kind of goes along with that is if you want success, if you want more success in your life and you want it quicker, you have to be willing to fail more. Like intentionally cheap at it and try and go after more fails.
So when you look at a toddler learning to walk, how many times do they fall down and fail to walk before they learn how to walk? Hundreds? Thousands? Up, down, up, down. They stand up, they wobble, they flop, they fall on their ***, right? Over and over and over. But that process of getting up and then falling down, getting up, landing on their ***, they’re doing squats, they’re building their leg muscles.
And that process of getting up, falling down, getting up, falling down, is what gives them what they need to actually be able to walk and learn balance and to figure it out, if they try to get up one time or two or three times and they’re like, nope, I can’t walk, I’m just going to quit, right? It doesn’t work. You actually have to. It’s through that process of failing. That is how we’ve all learned how to walk.
Another example of this that I love now, forgive me if I’ve shared this before. I love this example. And it’s where they took two different college classes, ceramics college classes. And the one class, they told them, if you want to get an A in this class, you just need to produce one high quality piece of ceramic work. Just turn in one, like, perfect ceramic, and you’ll get an A in this class.
And then the other class, they told them, if you want to get an A in the ceramics class, you need to produce 50 pieces of ceramic. Doesn’t matter how good they are. You just have to get 50 done if you would like to get an A. And if you get less, then you get a B and whatever. So they took both classes, and then they looked at the quality of their work and what was produced. And between the two classes, guess which one had the highest quality ceramic work that was turned in well.
And it’s of course, the group that did 50 that had to turn in 50 there was a ton of crappy ceramic work turned in in that class, like, lots of failed ceramics, goals that were messed up and whatever they were making right. But that class also had the highest quality work. And why is that? Because through the process of producing 50 pieces of ceramic work, they learned how to use it, they learned how to manipulate it. They got good, oh, try that. That failed. No, that doesn’t work. And they just got better and better and better at it. But the group that was focused on just doing it right and perfect, they didn’t produce this high quality work because they didn’t have all that repetition and experience.
this is the process of development, is fail. Lots and lots and lots of failures. And then you succeed, and then you try the next thing, and it’s lots and lots of fails and maybe a little bit works and this kind of thing works, but we’re putting all these pieces together, and then we get to something that’s like, network competent or something. So the question is never if you fail. The question is how to do failure so that you can succeed.
And here’s five easy steps that I came up with to approach this so that you can get good at failure. The first thing is to just try to teach our kids, try. And I tell my kids all the time, like, showing up is half the battle. Like, enter the contest and, like, you’re halfway there. Or, you know, go out for the part or just get some words on paper, like, just fry, start, just try. Right? And the second thing is, is fail. Like, fail at it. Don’t do great, do miserable, whatever, fail. And then three is to evaluate what worked, what didn’t work, what do I want to try next? So you have to evaluate the failure. And then the fourth step is to try again. And then the fifth step is to keep repeating that process. And as you’re repeating it, celebrate your little wins along the way. And celebrate your failures along the way. Well tried. That good for me for trying. I’m proud of you for trying, for showing up and trying again. Like, celebrate, celebrate each time you showing up, whether you win or fail. Five easy steps.
And what if you never succeed? If you’re thinking, well, what if I try and fail and I try and fail and I evaluate and I keep trying and I still fail? I promise you, you’re still better for trying. You’re still better for trying. You’re still a more developed person than before. You haven’t tried yet. So it’s not if you fail because we’re humans. It’s part of this human gig. It’s how are you in your fails? Are you kind to yourself? Do you learn what you can from your fails? Or are you a total jerk to yourself and beat yourself up and make your fails mean terrible things about you friends. It is time to be nice to ourselves and be willing to fail a whole lot more.
If we want to develop and if we want to support development of our young people, it’s time to just be nice and focused on let’s keep trying, let’s keep developing, let’s keep trying things. How cool you failed at that. How cool that you actually put yourself out there and did that new thing.
I’m so proud of my kids when they are willing to just try and put themselves out there and take the risk, right? And then if they succeed, cool bonus will cherry on top. But you know what? I’m just so proud of them for showing up. And so that’s what I want to offer to you about how you think about fails and how we talk about fails and how we are in them. Failing is inevitable. It’s just inevitable.
And if you’re just winning all the time and never failing, you are not challenging yourself enough. You are actually not developing. If all you do is succeed, you’re playing small, right? If we really want development to happen, it means we have to be willing to fail a lot more and stretch ourselves in ways that we are for sure going to fail. And that’s where you’re going to get the most growth. The more you’re failing, the more you’re actually opening yourself up to growth.
And so that’s my little pitch on failing. And I do recognize that a lot of our autistic and neurodivergent young people do experience a lot of fails. But that doesn’t have to be a problem. That can actually be a really great thing. It’s just all about how we are in it and about it and how we support and how we talk about and what we focus on.
And the cool thing with that is the more we open up to sales, we truly are going to have more wins. It’s just inevitable. So your homework assignment this week is to go fail a bunch. And I hope you have an amazing week and celebrate those fails and those little wins along the way. Take care.
[13:07] Debbie: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Autism and Neurodiversity with Jason and Debbie. If you want to learn more about our work, come visit us at jasondebbie.com.
