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I’m believe that the best opportunities come from our darkest and most troubling moments, failure. Last year, I regularly listened to Elizabeth Day’s podcast called ‘How To Fail’. The episode that caught my attention was an interview with Ruby Wax, a name I know well but a personality I’ve never been keen on as a celebrity figure.
However, as I listened, I realised I wasn’t hearing the story I had expected to. The usually brash Wax was explaining how she’s left showbusiness because it didn’t serve her mental health. However, in her darkest moment, she found a new calling. She gained a master’s degree from Oxford University in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and is now a mental health campaigner and author.
Ruby now runs a daily virtual ‘Frazzled Café’ where people can come together and chat about daily stresses. It’s a registered charity which provides a much-needed safe environment where it’s ok not to be ok.
Society fails too
Mental Health might be one of our most prominent perceived failures. We can’t accept it and so we don’t talk about it. It is not something to be proud of. We are broken, different, odd, crazy, not OK. And yet, it is incredibly widespread. If we could embrace this ‘failure’ imagine how strong we could become and the support we could offer each other.
Interestingly, there’s another collective failure that comes to mind: the issue of widespread extinction recently highlighted by David Attenborough. We’ve failed as humans to look after our planet. We can continue to ignore that failure and things will only get worse. Or we can acknowledge the failure, fail forward, learn from our mistakes and correct them.
No-one is born worrying about failure. Babies can do no wrong in anyone’s eyes. There are no expectations. However, we have created a society where measurement, assessment and comparison start very early in life and so we teach our children, at a very young age, that they could do better.
Failosophy
Elizabeth Day is well known for her work on failure. Her recent book, Failosophy, which distils everything she has learnt over two-and-a-half years of talking about failure. It shares inspirational quotes and tips on how to get through life’s trickier experiences. But, most of all, it covers seven failure principles to help you come to terms with, and deal with, failure.
These include such pearls of wisdom as “just because you fail does not make you a failure” and “you are not your anxious brain” (explained by the fact that our brains will tell us that something is dangerous even when it isn’t).
The really nice thing about this book is that it can be read as a whole (and in one sitting, it’s not that long) but also dipped into when facing a specific issue which makes it an easy reference to navigate the subject of failure even as it happens.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Henry Ford which is worth using as a catalyst to change the way you feel about failure: “Failure is the only opportunity to begin again.”
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