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I’m curious about our attitude towards failure. We experience it and yet we try to pretend it isn’t there; we see it as negative, embarrassing, stupid. In fact, we are so against failure – and even people who fail – it has become a thread of our culture. Society itself rejects failure.
So many valuable lessons are learned when we fail. When coaching leaders, we focus on success and this includes learning from failures, analysing what doesn’t work in order to ascertain what does.
What do people believe are the consequences of failure?
Throughout our lives, we have visible and invisible standards. From spelling tests at school to bringing up your own children, you are either measured or you are measuring yourself. When I had my son, I was acutely aware that how I chose to feed him was a point of focus for ‘society’. My midwife had key messages that she needed to convey to her patients. One of which was ‘breast is best’. For mums who weren’t able to breastfeed, there was an instant feeling of judgement. Had we failed? Were we somehow not doing the right thing for our baby? When you look around do you know who was breastfeed or not?
My feeling of failure was intense enough for me to want to start afresh. I had the chance to go to America to work and I took it. It was also the chance to reinvent myself, to be seen as more than just a mum. So, we settled there as a family for a few years and I did reinvent myself: with braces for my teeth, having my eyes lasered and doing lots of healthy inner work about being a mum.
Are we good enough?
This is a common theme for many women – are we good enough? And it’s not just parenting: how about impostor syndrome in business? Why do we feel we are continually judged and/or needing to reach an unspoken standard?
My thoughts are that our media leads on this. The British press is cutthroat when it comes to reporting on people in the public eye. Think of the sports people, failing to stick to their quarantine rules; the Welsh rugby player who felt he had to come out as HIV positive just to beat the media story; Caroline Flack – her ‘failure’ cost her dearly; Harry and Megan couldn’t do right for wrong; Government U-turns during the covid crisis. All of these things are held up as failures and our press – and potentially their readership – are pretty unforgiving.
John Maxwell is known for saying “Fail early, fail often but always fail forward.”
Do we forget the massive amount of learning that happens when we fail?
Our worst moments can give rise to our greatest outcomes. I’ve written before about Brene Brown’s book, Rising Strong. In this she shares what it means to accept failure and the tools we then need to survive and move on. Failure is an integral part of the way we grow and learn. If we can learn to own our failure, accept it, learn from it and move on, there is no doubt we will be stronger and more knowledgeable.
The first step to seeing failure as a worthwhile experience is to change our mindset. I pick clients up on their use of the word ‘try’. If I set them a challenge or a task and they respond with “OK, I’ll give that a try” they are immediately opening the door to failure. They are assuming they will try but not succeed and they are allowing this to block their progress.
Instead, they might report back and say “I did it, I’m not very good at it….YET.” This particular little three letter word can make the world of difference to our acceptance of trips and spills as we learn. Let’s fail forward. We can use our failures to improve. “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.”
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