Rethinking Failure

I got this great fortune cookie the other night.

It says “You’re not a failure because you don’t make it, you’re a success because you tried.”

Mind blown!

You’ll hear a lot of folks ask you “what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” Now I’m a dreamer and I love how this gives me room to dream of everything I’ve ever wanted in life — no holds bar.

But what happens when failure enters the picture?

Reality check! It’s inevitable that you will fail at things in life, yet we have such an ingrained aversion to failures. Our self-worth is tied to our successes. Look at all the comparisonitis that goes on.

Let me ask you to consider what failure means to you?

For me, a recovering maladaptive perfectionist, failure always meant the end of the world, that I was the failure, my life was ruined. Have you ever felt that way?

There were so many things holding me back because of the fear of failure. The untimely loss of a loved one taught me that life was short (she was only 34) and never guaranteed despite our best efforts. This loss pushed me to take huge leaps of faith and overcome my fears of failure so I could live the life I actually wanted to live.

I worked hard at, and continue to work hard at, keeping my expectations in check and shifting how I see failure. Seeing this little fortune cookie sums it all up in a way that seems almost laughable and obvious, but it’s really not so obvious.

Being self-employed is rife with failures, yet I keep going because my vision and dream for my future require me to walk this path, get uncomfortable and face those failures. When you’re self-employed you get to call the shots, but that also means you miss a lot of those shots, especially in the beginning.

If I let my fear of failure drive I wouldn’t be writing this blog post to share with you, I wouldn’t have left a stable job to pursue my art, I wouldn’t have become a life coach, I wouldn’t have even attempted to see if my dreams were possible. I would have missed out on the opportunity to help others, share my gifts, and live a life I enjoy waking up to each morning.

Through trial and a heck of a lot of error I’ve learned that if I wanted to make it, I had to be ok with failing sometimes and, most importantly, that I had to shift my views on failure.

Instead of thinking about what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail,

I want you to think about what you would do in your life if you knew you could survive failure?

What if we looked at failure as feedback or a response to our actions, a stimulus response sort of thing?

We could view our life as a science experiment. We test an idea, see what happens. Instead of that didn’t work I guess I’ll crawl into a hole now we could shift to that didn’t work, but what if I tried this other thing instead?

This shift in how I see failure has given me the courage I never had before. To fail beautifully, learn from it, and try again. Because life is a great experiment.

Action Step
What do you want to experiment with this week? What do you want to shift in your life? Pick one thing no matter how small and simple it sounds. Share in the comments. Let’s chat! You can even book a free 30 min call with me to dive deeper into rethinking failure when it comes to making changes in your life.

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