Persistent failures when trying to succeed can often lead to learned helplessness. It is a feeling where you feel that a situation will not change or is unchangeable due to experiencing stressful failures consistently.
This type of mentality can often lead to believing no matter what you do, you cannot fix the outcome or you have no control over the results.
Learned Helplessness In Business
If you decide to go the entrepreneur route and start a business you could experience learned helplessness if everything you do in the business leads to failures. You will start to believe all of your actions are incorrect due to the fact that nothing is going your way. Failure after failure will put you in a mental state where you feel that all outcomes are no longer in your control and the bad situation is inescapable. This could lead to anxiety, depression, and ending your entrepreneurial journey.
Learning to learn from your mistakes or looking at the full business picture will help in overcoming learned helplessness in business. If you can look outside the box and see your mistakes as lessons instead of failures, you can continue to add that knowledge in your entrepreneurial toolbox. You should see the business world with an open mind and see that starting and owning a business comes with all sorts of emotions. Realize that many businesses fail but at the same time many succeed ONLY after many failures. Stressful situations repeating will put you through a learned helplessness state. Only you can change that state of mind with breaking the habit of seeing it as a failure and starting to see it as a learned lesson in business.
Learned Helplessness In School
Learned helplessness can start at a very early age in school for some people. You take a math class in elementary school and fail multiple test. You get to middle school and in the back of your mind you know that for some reason you are not good at math because you consistently failed at math in elementary school. All of your failed math experiences carry on to middle school and high school. You think you are just naturally bad at math, you feel it is unchangeable and avoid taking the harder math classes in high school. College comes around and you avoid majors at all cost that are heavy math focused. This is learned helplessness. Steady repeated failures leading you to believe you cannot succeed in math.
This learned helplessness phenomenon in the mind leads people to believe they cannot accomplish something. The mind can be beautiful but at the same time can destroy your dreams if your mentality is not aligned to your dreams. Your mind in learned helplessness is already wired to “hate” math because that mentality is “normal” to you now due to the many failures you’ve experienced. What you have to do is fight those bad experiences in your head and tell yourself you will start leaning math with a fresh clear mind. Forget about the thoughts that you are “bad” at math. Start learning it with an open mind and with learning techniques that best fit your needs. Break the learn helplessness state of mind by rewiring your brain to relearn the subject and create new experiences that allow you to break your old state of mind.
Learned Helplessness in Personal Finance
Personal finance is a subject that is not very well introduced too many people at a young age. We experience personal finance on our own through entering adult hood and for most people, through no guidance. No guidance means that we can create bad habits from the first pay check we receive as adults. Burying ourselves in credit card debt or car loans. This behavior can continue to repeat and cause stress due to most of the income received going to debt payments. This cycle can seem unchangeable or inescapable for many people. Their state of mind can become learned helplessness. For people who grew up in poverty and experienced financial hardships since childhood, they could also experience learned helplessness by seeing their parents in bad situations repeatedly. Children at a young age instill the belief that becoming wealthy is unreachable due to their repeated experiences of seeing their parents in bad financial situations.
Creating a financial roadmap is one of the most successful ways to fix learned helplessness in personal finance. Financial literacy should be your second language you want to learn. You should know where all of your income is being spent on and find ways to reach your goals. If you are in debt, search for strategies on how to create a roadmap to get you out of debt. If you have no savings, search for strategies on how you can save more. Change your state of mind by telling yourself you have a financial roadmap and you are in control. Treat yourself like a business. Think of yourself as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of YOU. Figure out how you as the CEO of YOU can get yourself out of a messy situation and change your life.