Failure. Let's learn to love it.

Even reading and writing the word doesn’t feel nice does it?

But why?

Why do we demonise failure?

This needs to stop. Luckily there’s been an abundance of material released in the past few years promoting the concept of failure. Take Elizabeth Day’s successful book and podcast ‘how to fail’ and my beloved podcast ‘the high performance podcast’ whose mantra is;

There is no such thing as failure, only feedback

So we’re experiencing a noticeable shift in the way we view it. However, I worry the negative connotations failure has for most of us are so deeply ingrained that we need to work hard to recondition ourselves.

Think about school, if you ever received the word FAIL in red on a test paper it was the worst feeling ever. Or, your driving test, the mention of FAIL again, horrific connotation. So, how do we train our brains to think differently?

Train your brain

Mo Gawdet, former Google X Executive who experienced great loss when his 21 year old son, died unexpectedly during a routine appendectomy. Mo went on to invent a formula for happiness (below) and wrote a book called ‘Solve for Happy’. He talks about how our brain responds to orders, if we instruct it to raise our left hand, our brain would never raise our left knee. Therefore, on this pretence we need to give our brain clear instructions and it will obey. He explains how your brain is nothing but a muscle, much like your heart or stomach, therefore do not give it any more power than to function in this way. When negative and irrational thoughts of failure enter your brain such as ‘my life is a failure’ immediately move on, there is only room for constructive and joyful thoughts. Highly recommend a listen/read.

This formula makes perfect sense, right? If we make our expectations on life realistic and achievable, we will be happy. If we predict failure and believe it is inevitable; when it happens, we will still be happy.

Failure & risk

As a self-proclaimed risk taker, you’d think failure is something I don’t care about, however that’s not true. I think the way I personally deal with the concept of failure is avoidance. I never stop to ask myself, so what happens if this fails?

I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

I’ve experienced some pretty big failures in my life and I still continue to make them every day. You may be thinking well there you go, nailed it. No, not quite. Where I go wrong is, I fail, then quickly bounce back from it, but then I keep making the same ones, over and over again.

No pain, no gain

It’s the sitting with the pain and the mistake. Feeling and absorbing it. Because if you don’t, like me, you will do it again.

After this recent self-discovery, I am trying to implement this into my life. Stop trying to fix and quickly move on, live in the situation for a while. I can tell you now, this is hard, really hard, but I think I am making progress.

Some days I really do consider leaving my old job a big mistake. I know I’ve written a lot about my new career as a teacher, but walking away from a role I enjoyed and was good at, was really hard. Usually you leave a job because you’re unhappy right? Not me.

My friend Natalie who kindly proof reads all these articles said you can quote me on this;

Being a teacher won’t fulfil you as you’d miss the high pressured environment and it won’t push your boundaries enough

It felt like the right time and I was eager to explore a completely different career. Therefore, do we class this as failure or just a learning experience?

And next time?

If we live our life in this state of comfort and avoidance of failure we will never learn. But, if we keep changing yet not learning from our mistakes that could be just as bad.

I invite you to sit and think for one minute about something you failed at this week, might be something small such as forgetting to log on for your weekly team meeting. What was the consequence of this failure? And, most importantly, what did you learn from it that you can easily avoid moving forward? Was this is the first time you forgot?

Do this at the end of every day, taking careful notice of the key learns and what you would do differently next time. Rather than, unhelpfully re-living the failure over and over again. You may see patterns.

Failure is feedback. Failure is growth. Just make lots and lots of different ones!

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