26 - Celebrating Failure

1.) Until recently, I worked at PetSmart. My exact job title was "Pet Care Associate", and my primary duties included taking care of all the husbandry for every live animal in the store (the fish, reptiles, small mammals, birds, and feeder insects. basically every non-cat/dog creature) and helping customers with anything related to those animals. Every customer who came to the store hoping to purchase an animal would be interacting with me during that process.
      Now, as anyone who has worked retail can confirm, people who are in the "shopper's" mindset can be very unreasonable people, with little regard for company policy or respect for the humble worker. They are a minority, but customers such as this operate as if they are entitled to the right to purchase something, and they typically are not receptive to any information that might interfere with those expectations. For most stores, this is frustrating but ultimately the outcome is inconsequential: either they get whatever deal they were asking for or they don't, and aside from potentially bending the rules a bit, there are usually no lasting problems when a manager decides to give a rowdy customer what they want."The customer is always right", or so the saying goes. In a pet store, however, things are a bit different. When the merchandise being purchased is a live animal that is intended to be a pet, it becomes very important to make sure the customer understands the needs of the animal they are buying, and if they do not, then allowing a sale becomes more than a simple matter of giving in for the sake of preserving company reputation. It becomes a matter of allowing an animal to go to a potentially neglectful or abusive home.
     I promise I am getting to my personal failures, but first I need to establish a little bit more context. Large chain pet stores carry many products that are not actually good for the animals they are marketed for. The reasons these products exist are many, but it is primarily due to customer expectations and social normalcy.The stores carry them because uninformed people will buy them. Animal husbandry is an evolving topic, and many practices that were accepted as adequate 20-30 years ago are no longer viewed favorably due to an increasing amount of information about an animal's natural habitat or behaviors. One of the MOST difficult parts of my job was basically convincing people that many of the things they assumed about an animal are incorrect and then informing them of up-to-date husbandry standards that will help their pet not just survive, but actually thrive.
    This is where my failures occurred.
    To be clear, I was generally good at my job. I helped countless people improved the care their pets were receiving, and in most cases any shortcomings in a customer's animal care were simply due to a lack of information, so once I brought those shortcomings to their attention and explained how they should be improved most people were generally pretty accepting of it. But remember those unreasonable retail customers in the entitled "customer is always right" mindset I mentioned earlier? They were the hard ones. I've dealt with so many people who wanted to buy an animal without really caring to learn what that animal needed that I can't think of too many specific incidents. They all sort of blend together in my mind. My failures were times when I failed to convince someone that fish should not be kept in bowls, that hamsters and birds need much more space than the tiny cages on the shelves, that an animal is either solitary and should be kept alone OR that it is social and needs a group, that the baby reptile or fish they want is small now but will grow MUCH larger and therefore needs a large enclosure. I could go on and on.
   Each time I failed to convince a customer to think of an animal as a living being just like a dog or cat instead of a good or toy for their child, I failed to ensure that animal went to a good home.

2.) What I learned from these failures is that I cannot reach people who do not want to be reached. In order to change someone's mind, they first need to be open to new information that counters what they know. I learned that, while I can always improve my approach and speaking skills, I won't always be able to control the outcome of a situation, and failure isn't always my fault. My failures did lead me to improve my people skills and to learn more about animal husbandry so I could be as informed as possible, but I also learned not to dwell too much on failures when they happened.

3.) I think failure is a very important part of life. Fear of failure can hold you back and prevent you from understanding what your capabilities are. I do not think that anyone has become truly successful without experiencing a large amount of failure along the way, and failures are a crucial part of the growth process. Personally, the way I deal with failures depends on their context. In situations where the outcome is not a huge deal in the big picture, I generally do not stress too much. I tend to not worry too much over the things I feel I have no control over. In situations where the stakes are high, however, I usually stress quite a bit over the possible outcomes before making a decision of taking action. I always try to access things to determine how likely I am to succeed and how much I can realistically do to improve those odds. I have not noticed a change in my perspective regarding failure as a result of this class, though I may be slightly more likely to take risks than before. I think that is due to my having more information about how things work.