The Wonderful Word for Wednesday is ‘Failure’
Here’s the thing, failure is part of life for EVERYBODY, so why do we fear it so much?
We fear it because it is uncomfortable and embarrassing. Failure can cause us to feel stuck and lose hope.
Have you failed? Of course you have, you’re alive right? Since we have ALL experienced failure and most certainly will again, why don’t we change the negative narrative around failure?
Top 10 Reasons Failure is Fabulous
#1 Failure Forces Us to be Innovative
Now I know we all know this. But let’s give it some good thought here. Think about one of your best failures, what came after? Once you were done being angry or sad about your failure, what was next? Were you forced to come up with other solutions? Were you forced to totally take a different path which eventually led to success? Perhaps you were suddenly able to have a fundamental switch in the way you were operating that led to better things.
With each failure I have experienced, I spend less time wallowing in my upsetness (there I go making up words again) and embarrassment, and am quicker to get to the problem solving thinking that gets me out of my funk. THAT’s success!
#2 Failure Makes Us Try Harder (from my son Zach)
That’s all he had to say about that. Succinct.
#3 Failure Teaches Us Humility
I know, I know, we all feel we are humble already. Or maybe we see humility as a weak character trait, BUT, those are little white lies that help us feel better.
Take a hard think about when you were most successful and how you grew farther and farther away from true humility.
When we experience failure, what’s worse, experiencing it, or having others see us experiencing it? For me it’s definitely harder when others see my failures, but when I’m open about them, others feel freer to share with me their true selves as well.
I mean, think about social media and how it makes others appear to be so successful because all we post about is our successes. I’m guilty of this was well.
What if we posted one failure a day, well, maybe one a week?
We would all see that we are not alone, that others are not as perfect as they look on social media, and we would all be more humble and real with each other. Wouldn’t it be easier for us to post our failures if we knew others were posting theirs as well? We could even have a contest: Whomever has the biggest failure this week gets a GOLD STAR! Oh I dare to dream.
#4 Each Failure is One Step Closer to Success
Allow me to share a quote from one of my most favorite books, “Get Messy Art” by Caylee Grey:
“I have a theory that we’re all due a certain number of terrible pages of art before we hit one that we adore. I don’t know what that number is, but let’s say it’s one hundred. Every time you create bad art, rather than beating yourself up about it, just acknowledge that it is one of those designated bad pieces and celebrate the fact that you’ve checked it off the list. You’ll never have to do that one again, and you’re closer to that lovely piece.”
That about sums up this one!
#5 We Learn More from Failure Than Success
This one will help us flip our thinking upside down about failure. When we fail, we should allow ourselves to be sad/embarrassed/angry for a set period of time. Depending of the level of failure, this could be one hour, or day, or even a week, BUT, then we need to turn right around and ask ourselves, “What can I learn from this?”.
I believe that learning what NOT to do is as important, if not more important, than learning what TO do. So we need failure to get to success. It’s the Yin and the Yang, ya gotta have both.
#6 Failure Means We are Trying New Things
We have all played it safe on something because we feared failure. Because we didn’t try, we also didn’t fail, but we also didn’t succeed. Hmmmm…..
So if we are failing a lot, it simply means we are sticking ourselves out there, trying new things, taking risks, falling down, and trying again until we reach SUCCESS. Without risk, we cannot get to success. With risk comes failure BUT also success.
Here’s how it might look:
Try something new —-> failure 1 —-> failure 2 —-> failure 3 —-> SUCCESS —-> failure 1 —-> failure 2 —–> SUCCESS —->failure 1 —–> SUCCESS —-> SUCCESS —-> SUCCES!
If we know that’s the pattern, it makes it easier doesn’t it? And that brings us to #7:
#7 Failure is Part of Life, the More We Fail and Get Back Up, the Less Scary Failure Becomes
It’s a fact. We will fail and fail again, and again, and again. We will have various levels of failure all throughout our lives. The only thing is, we must use them to grow or they will all be for nothing.
If you aren’t experiencing NEW FAILURES, then you are not learning from your previous failures my friend.
So, as long as you are experiencing new failures because you are trying new things, you’re doing amazing! You are LIVING – DOING – LEARNING. Failure is part of living, let’s get over it and use it to our advantage!
#8 Failure Can Put Us on the Right Path
Picture this, you are walking down a beautiful path in the forest and you come to a Y in the road. Both look the same, but ya gotta pick one. You pick the left one simply because you are a lefty (wink wink), it’s beautiful too and you carry on until you come to another Y in the road, and you take the left again because that seemed to work the first time. You walk along and suddenly you find you are encountering brambles and they get thicker and thicker until you can’t keep going. You found the wrong path! Now you know! So you go back and take the path to the right and it’s beautiful and leads you to a picture perfect waterfall.
We can’t always know we are on the right path until we take the wrong one! And the cool thing is, the next time you take a friend, you’ll show them the RIGHT path and they won’t have to experience the wrong one.
#9 Failure Can Bring a Time of Rest
Sometimes, we experience a complete dead end type of failure. There’s no Y in the road, just a dead end. With this type of failure, it is wise to go back to where you started, take a rest, and find your strength. If we sometimes allow ourselves to stop in the midst of failure, rest awhile, go do something that has NOTHING to do with what we failed at, and just give our brains and souls a break from striving, we will come at the thing anew later.
The trick is knowing when we need to strive and when rest is required. The good thing is that we will get lots of practice with this and if we are approaching failure correctly, we will learn when to strive and when to rest.
#10 (Fill in the Blank)
What did I miss? What do you have to say about failure and why it’s awesome? Please comment below, I’d LOVE to hear your thoughts on this.
Okay Friends! Let’s go and FAIL a LOT then SHARE IT, and GROW!
Kimberly Snider, Virtuoso, Signing Off
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