How to beat the failure cycle in ten minutes

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 DAVID DI SIPIO: Hello, everyone. Welcome. A quick show of hands - who has ever failed at something? Yes, so have I. Keep your hand up if that failure was related to some sort of fitness goal at the start of the year. Yep. So why is that? Right? That's what I'm going to hopefully unpack in this 10-minute talk. So there's this thing called the failure cycle and I feel like understanding this can help us understand why we fail at things like gym, resolutions or fitness resolutions at the start of the year. So the best way to explain it is through using a gym. It's essentially got four stages. It starts with some excitement. So January and February are actually great times for gyms because we come out of Christmas, we come out of new years, we want to lose a couple of kilos and start eating healthy and being right. However, as it starts to become winter, we may start to avoid the gym and we throw away the gym card we avoid going with our friends to the gym and soon that excitement we first started with in January or February is gone. Then what happens is we start to make excuses and we all know these. I make them too. Bloody gym, it's too full. It's too cold to the go the gym. Work's too busy. These sorts of excuses. And if it really starts to get out of hand we start to blame - blame the person who sold us the gym membership, blame the people at the gym why you can't go to the gym and you start pointing the finger. And what happens is when you point the finger, there's three fingers pointing back at you. It's a slippery slope, a really slippery slow. But the idea with this failure circle is understanding when you're tipping over from excitement to avoidance. Ideally you want to keep that excitement going. That way we can, you know, bring this sort of understanding to the work that we do, our relationships and life in general. I'm going to share a little bit about one of my failure cycles. Tht is me in front of my sailing boat when I was 12 years old. This is probably the first time I can remember going through the failure cycle. I didn't know I was going through it then but reflecting back now I did. It doesn't look like me but that's Flick my little boat. Why I bring up is sailing is I remember being really, really excited about sailing. I couldn't wait. The night before I started my first sailing lesson I was so excited. However, I soon realised that it was really bloody hard to sail. And what would happen is, when it got really, really windy, the boom - this thing, this metal pole would hit you in the head and it would really hurt. So I then started to make some excuses as to why I couldn't go sailing - too windy, too cold, I didn't feel like going. And then what I started to do is blame. I started to blame my mum, blame my dad, why did you put me into sailing lessons? Why have you got me doing this? This is a rid I think louse idea - ridiculous idea. And one of the times I started to reflect on something that was really difficult that I was excited to do initially but in the end I absolutely hated it. The reason I share that with you is because I'm keen to understand where the failure cycle appears for others. I only have a couple of minutes because we're on a tight schedule but I want to think where this plays out for you in your life and then I want you to introduce yourself to the person next to you and have a bit of a chat. About a minute. Go for it.
2. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 2 of 3 Alright. I think we will bring it back in. That sounds like a lot of failure. Anyone happy to share something that they had? Something that came up? Yeah? Alex? SPEAKER: (Inaudible) DAVID DI SIPIO: That's huge, yeah. SPEAKER: DAVID DI SIPIO: So you know all about the excuses. Does anyone have a design example? SPEAKER: (Inaudible) DAVID DI SIPIO: Good one. That is a good one. Thanks for that. Thanks for sharing. So why do people fail? There's a couple of listens that I - reasons that I've boiled it down to. One is we have the wrong goals. If we're not excited from the get go or if someone is forcing us to go to the Jim but you don't want to go to the gym to lose that weight, long goal wrong goals. I can't make the goals for you. The other is an unclear focus. You might sign up at F-45 and then you think it's really hard and there's this running group and if I can run with them three times a week it will be easier, unclear focus is another reason we end up failing. Another is not having an action plan. I like using the gym as an example, but we go there and I will do this, a bit of that and there's no plan. So that is another reason why some people might fail. Another one is mental barriers. This is the one I like because I call this like head trash, it's what we tell ourselves. When we tell ourselves things they can become real. So these mental barriers can stop us from actually aChiefing what we want to achieve because what we tell ourselves plays a big part in how we perform and what we do. The last one is mindset. Everyone has heard about the fixed and the growth mind set. Right? I'm not a person who goes to the gym. I'm never someone who has gone to the gym and you start to put that into your mind. I like this because it gives us some, I suppose, way to look at why we fail. So we've all had these sorts of things come up in our head - for example, a fixed mind set says I don't like to be challenged or I stick to what I know. When we tip over from excitement to avoidance, but we want to stick in the growth area and telling ourselves these things. So when we're challenged we say challenges help me grow, instead of oh, no, not another challenge. Or failure is an opportunity to learn as opposed to failure is like defeat. Comes Karl brek, I highly recommend reading that book, it's great. I now really love sailing and it's not because sailing changed. It's because I necessarily changed my mind set. For me, this is me sailing on one of my friends' boat. I don't have a sail boat, not yet. And this is me with my girlfriend and I absolutely love it. This is - this is something I've learnt through the failure cycle.
3. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 3 of 3 We also run a meetup, so if you like what we've spoken about here today, we run a meetup in Melbourne once a month where we talk about psychology and user experience. If you're not in Melbourne, we also have a Facebook community which is global and we have practitioners from all over the world. One last thing before I go is that I'd like you all to point your fingers at the stage towards me. What are the three things pointing back at you? I'll leave you with that one. Take care. Thanks a lot for that. [APPLAUSE]