What Do We Do With Failure?

Tal Ben- Shahar, a positive psychology master,  has a great line that I find myself using in most of my workshops.  It’s that universal a concept.   “ Learn to fail or fail to learn.”  It’s simply a fact of life and no amount of shielding can keep us from experiencing failure at some points in our lives.   It’s what we do with it that counts.

As parents, especially nowadays, there’s a ‘movement’ known as overparenting that does it’s best to bubble-wrap  children so as to protect and save them from the “F” experience.   But lo and behold all that’s doing is guaranteeing failure later on and worse, an inability to handle it in productive way.  Children need to learn to cope with small failures and disappointments so they can handle the bigger ones later on.

“The challenges your children will face serve an important purpose.  They help them hone and develop the capabilities they need to succeed throughout their lives.  Coping with a difficult teacher, failing at a sport, learning to navigate the complex social structure of cliques in school – all those things become courses in the school of experience.”  Clay Christensen (Professor at Harvard Business School)

And for all of us, daring to fail puts us out there in a more active and high-reaching way.  When we’re not afraid of failure we’re more apt to take risks, take on challenges and therefore maximize our potential.   We will live a more engaged, exciting and thriving life, open to learning and growing.

However, operating out of a place of fear, fear of failing, is a real short-changer.  We’re slighting ourselves, and by not giving ourselves the opportunities to attempt and experience things outside our zone of assurance, we remain in a very static and cloistered frame.

So what’s so terrible about failing?  What will happen to us?  Will it be the end of our life?

We will feel those icky feelings of disappointment, maybe some doses of rejection, pain, and a hit to our self-esteem.    We don’t like to feel these things, granted.  Nobody does.

But feel it we must and know it’s perfectly normal and natural.  And we will get through it.  And then comes the important points of choice.

1. Am I going to give up or learn from my failure?
2. Am I going to cope with it or avoid?
3. Am I going to be open to what I can learn from this failure or shut down and even look to blame another?
4. Am I going to see how and what I can do differently next time, to improve my chances of success?
5. Will I get back up, work harder and go back into the ring of life to try again, at the same thing or something different?

I’m sure we’ve all felt that high, that huge sense of pride and exhilaration when we’ve struggled at something, even failed at it and then finally achieved success.  We don’t get that great feeling when something comes so easy.   Not to say that we need everything to be a struggle in order to feel good but it does become that much more meaningful when we’ve worked really hard through failure at the something we want and then achieved it.

So let’s not be afraid of failure.  Let’s not run from it by not trying.  Let’s not succumb to it by giving up.  For it can serve us well.

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” – Denis Waitley

Thanks for stopping by.  Any failures you care to share?  Any lessons learned?  Please share this post so others can choose to dance with failure.