Throughout my entire life, my identity relied upon a reputation for being a person who did everything without any flaws. Everything had always been expected to be done perfectly, whether this related to academic achievements or involvement in various after-school clubs and sports teams. My perception of myself crumbled completely just before my senior year began when, along with my debating partner, I competed in the final round of the Regional Debate Championships. Standing at the beautifully carved wooden debating podium and looking down at my prepared notes on index cards, I knew that there was nothing else to be expected other than a definitive win for us. Yet, within no more than thirty minutes, my perfect world came tumbling down as we were announced as losing the match by the chief judge. Despite feeling utterly destroyed by that failure at first, being knocked out of the regional debate finals proved to be instrumental in teaching me how to overcome failure and learn something new instead.
Our descent towards failure happened suddenly. Throughout all preceding debates, my debating teammate and I had managed to crush all opposition put forward against us without much effort. However, when faced with an unexpectedly sophisticated economic counter-argument in the cross examination phase of the debate, I found myself wholly unable to come up with any reply whatsoever. In my ears beat a loud pulse whilst my thoughts desperately searched for an argument which would never present itself. With stammers, jumbled pages and eventually even conceding defeat prior to time limits, my face burned in embarrassment as the judges calculated their scores in front of me.
During the days after the competition, being beaten seemed to weigh heavily upon me. Isolation followed, as I relived that minute-long period of utter paralysis multiple times within my mind. Before the match took place, my mental attitude had been one which could be described by contemporary cognitive psychology literature as a "fixed mindset." According to recent studies conducted into students' academic success, people who possess a fixed mindset tend to perceive themselves as incapable of developing further skills; hence, any form of failure is perceived by them as conclusive evidence regarding the presence of some intrinsic limitations on their intellectual ability (Burnette et al. 174). Thus, having identified myself solely through victory, I became aware of my inferiority when I lost the match, since I was convinced that perfection should come easily.
After accepting the fact that I would have to come out of self-pity sooner or later, I went back into the debating chamber after two weeks. My hands shaking nervously, I played the footage from the last round debate, staring directly at the precise instance when everything had gone terribly wrong. Analyzing my performance objectively offered me a completely new outlook on the entire situation. According to the latest studies in education regarding the process through which students learn to cope with difficulties, cognitive reappraisal, the conscious process of interpreting one’s own poor performance as valuable information instead of considering it evidence of intellectual incapacity, improves emotional resistance and skill development tremendously (Silaen 433). I realized that far from being a judgment upon my abilities as an individual, my failure was merely an instruction manual describing precisely what needed improvement.
In retrospect, such defeat at the regional level turned out to be the single defining experience in my entire academic career since it shattered my destructive pursuit of perfectionism and substituted it with a reliable, flexible approach to work. Indeed, failure revealed to me that real confidence does not derive from avoiding failure altogether; rather, one learns to gain it through an accurate understanding of how to recover from failure. Ultimately, any feeling associated with the loss of the championship disappeared, yet this lesson stuck with me forever.
