Today I’d like to talk about something that used to scare me a ridiculous amount. Sometimes it would practically paralyze me. Other times, the simple thought of it would set my heart racing, make it hard to breathe, and leave my palms sweaty.
And did I mention how embarrassing it seemed?
But then one day after I started practicing Mindful Change, someone helped me look at it differently. And, since then, I’ve stopped being scared or embarrassed about it.
What am I talking about? Failure.
Now I know you may be thinking that failure is a weird topic when you’re obviously interested in becoming even more successful than you are. But sometimes, when you want to be more successful, you actually need failure.
And you definitely need the lessons that failure teaches you.
Maybe you’re thinking, “If failure is helpful, why does it feel so awful?”
Someone once laughed at or teased you when you made a mistake – maybe they called you a loser or some other name because it made them feel better than you…even though they’d probably made the same mistake when you didn’t know about it – and that childish act set you up for a life of wanting to avoid failure.
It might even have made you scared to fail, like I used to be.
Of course none of us wants to fail, but failure is part of success. And being scared of it slows your progress.
When a baby is learning to walk, she falls…a lot. No one in their right mind would ever punish the baby for falling. And they’d never think that because she fell once, she’d never be able to walk.
Everyone knows that, before a baby can walk, she has to fall a few times.
Babies build muscle memory, neurological control, balance, and all of the other skills they need by trying and failing and trying again. It’s how they learn. And it’s how you learn, too.
Instead of fearing failure, embrace it as part of the process. If you never fail it means you never try anything beyond your current level. And if you want to be more successful than you are now, you have to try things beyond your current level.
Even if it doesn’t feel like it, failing means you’re moving forward.
I’m not saying that you should dive head-first into everything you want without first doing some investigation so that you can avoid common mistakes that you don’t have to make in order to learn.
I’m just saying that there comes a time when you have to dive head-first into what you want. There are lessons that books and other people can’t teach you. You have to experience things.
Remember your first experience with sex? You’d heard about it, maybe read about it, and probably thought about it a fair amount before you actually tried it. It was both what all of your “research” said and yet completely different, wasn’t it?
Life is about experience.
If you’re not sure if you’re delaying because you’re afraid of failure or you’re doing needed research before you start, contact me at heather@mindfulchange.com or call me at 613.601.1083, and we’ll set up a 30-minute discovery session.
Did my comment about sex make you wish your sex life was different or wonder if maybe it could be better? Next week we’ll talk about sex.
Until then, here’s the quote of the week:
“Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the
happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.”
~Andy Rooney