Making Sense of a Flop Era
Years ago, a client told me that they didn't feel they could set a bigger goal when they didn't hit the last goal they set. They wanted to aim for their initial target before upping the intensity of their goal. Makes sense, right?
I countered by explaining that we often don't hit relatively small goals because they don't require us to rethink our approach. We try to do the same things we've always done—just with more effort or frequency. When we set bigger goals, we have to reevaluate our strategy entirely. We discover more effective and efficient ways to move forward precisely because we gave ourselves an intense challenge.
I still believe that—and I've seen and experienced the results many times.
But I also recognize that I was missing a critical part of the puzzle back then. I was on an upward trajectory that felt like it would never end. I believed in my ability to create the outcomes I wanted to create. And I believed in my clients' ability to do the same.
In other words, I was out of touch with the feeling that comes from miss after miss—the frustration of cycling through failure.
Back in July, Jenny Blake wrote about being in a ‘flop era.’ That was the first time I’d encountered the phrase, but it was one of those linguistic discoveries that puts a name to something you didn’t know needed one.
In case you're as pop-culturally clueless as I am, ‘flop era' is a name for the experience of cycling through failure, often for years. In the midst of a flop era, you might begin to believe that every new idea or project is bound to fail—just like the last one. You can easily lose your motivation and feel out of control. You might start to believe that no matter what you do, something—whether an external force or a personal deficiency—will sabotage your success.
Put differently, a 'flop era' is characterized by diminished self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy, first described by psychologist Albert Bandura, is what we believe about our ability to produce desired outcomes.1 It’s related to self-esteem and self-confidence, but self-efficacy captures more of the motivational side of our self-image.
Self-efficacy is cumulative. If I identify a desirable outcome, act to produce that outcome, and then achieve it, it bolsters my self-efficacy. If I repeat that over and over again, my self-efficacy grows. However, if I find myself in a loop where nothing I do seems to lead to my desired outcomes, then my self-efficacy decreases over time. It takes time to build self-efficacy after it’s lost.
Now is a good time to check in on your self-efficacy. Who am I kidding? It's always a good time to check in on your self-efficacy! Vacation season is coming to a close (at least in the northern hemisphere), and the general tempo of life and work will speed up again soon. If you're thinking about new goals, committing to new practices, or deciding what projects you want to tackle, your level of self-efficacy colors all of your choices.
Our beliefs about our ability to bring about desired outcomes shape how we think, how motivated we are, what emotions we experience, and what goals or projects we select. When we experience diminished self-efficacy, we tend to approach life and work with caution. Our cautious approach often leads to middling performance outcomes—which only reinforces the belief that we've lost our edge. Luckily, the opposite is also true. When our level of self-efficacy is high, we feel confident, motivated, and in control—which tends to create impressive outcomes.
Much like ‘flop era,' when I learned about ‘self-efficacy,' I got a fancy new word for something I understood intuitively but lacked an analytical framework for. And it was an analytical framework I desperately needed, not only for coaching conversations like the one I opened with but for my own self-coaching. I needed ‘self-efficacy' to make sense of my own feelings and motivation (or lack thereof).
Self-efficacy is closely tied to what psychologists now understand as a human need: the need for competence. “Humans have a basic psychological need to be effective in their interactions with the world,” explains developmental psychologist Ellen Skinner. In a ‘flop era,’ this need isn’t being sufficiently met. If what I put out into the world isn’t landing, if it’s not getting the response I designed it to, then I won’t feel like I’m having effective interactions with the world.
‘Perceived control,’ Skinner explains, is a prime predictor of performance—that is, how effective our actions will be. We often feel out of control in environments marked by “non-contingency [predictable connection between cause and effect], unpredictability, normlessness (unclear expectations), or uncertainty.” Or like all of [gestures wildly] this.
Whether in our businesses, our jobs, the platforms we frequent, or even the political realm, many of us feel out of control because we’re bombarded by non-contingency, unpredictability, normlessness, and uncertainty. Nothing feels solid. We experience the world as liquid, never settling into a stable or persistent situation.
So what's a person in their flop era to do?
Luckily, having been in a flop era for something like 5 or 6 years, I have firsthand experience and some concrete ways get back on track.
We build self-efficacy by observing, imagining, and experiencing how action impacts circumstances. Therefore, we need to create opportunities to do all three. That might look like:
Developing relationships with people who are doing some version of what you want to do so you can observe how their behavior creates results
Reading, listening to, or watching stories of persisting through challenge
Envisioning your own actions creating the outcomes you desire
Create an action plan and “pre-mortem" to imagine yourself not only making forward progress but overcoming challenges
Designing small experiments to witness your own actions impacting outcomes
Using low-stakes goals to rebuild a sense of control and motivation
As I’ve been climbing out of my own flop era, I’ve focused on exercising skills that lends themselves to projects that are more predictable. Publishing twice a week. Offering workshops and programs that engage participants’ curiosity rather than promising a specific accomplishment. And taking on highly creative but very low-stakes client work (specifically, I’m spending a lot of time working on video content for one of our podcasting clients).
There's one more piece to this puzzle—and that's paying attention to our self-regulation system.
Self-regulation occurs over 3 phases—planning, action, and reflection.3 In the planning phase, we identify goals, set strategy, and tap into motivation. In the action phase, we undertake tasks, record results, and coach ourselves through the plan. In the reflection phase, we evaluate what happened, we observe our emotions and level of satisfaction, and consider what we might do differently next time.
That all might sound obvious, so I'll note that paying attention to these phases really matters. Even if it appears on paper like you're doing all these things, we easily get caught reacting to external circumstances. Instead of self-regulating based on what we have control over (no matter how small the scope of that may be), we try to regulate our actions to align with the liquid environment all around us. That is, and will always be, a losing battle.
The way out of a ‘flop era' is to stop trying to react to the market, the political environment, the daily news, or the emails in your inbox and start doing things you can actually control. Decide that you will take a short walk at 12:20pm every day—and then do it. Commit to writing 500 words three times a week—and then do it, even if it's gibberish.
And if something gets in your way? Notice that you're in control enough to adapt, to make a different but equally efficacious choice. Practice exerting control in the smallest ways, and you will meet your need for effectiveness and competence more often.
Remember, self-efficacy is cumulative—small wins add up. Whether at home, in the gym, at work, or out in your community, noticing the impact of your actions will help you feel confident when you're ready to make a bigger impact.
Footnotes
Bandura, Albert. "Exercise of personal agency through the self-efficacy mechanism." Self-efficacy. Taylor & Francis, 2014. 3-38.
Skinner, Ellen A. "Perceived control: Motivation, coping, and development." Self-Efficacy. Taylor & Francis, 2014. 91-106.
Zimmerman, Barry J., and Magda Campillo. "Motivating self-regulated problem solvers." The psychology of problem solving (2003): 233-262.
Bandura, Albert. "Social cognitive theory of self-regulation." Organizational behavior and human decision processes 50.2 (1991): 248-287.
