The Fun of Failing

Hi Friends,

It might sound odd and even weird to see failing and fun in the same sentence. All our lives we are taught that it's a bad thing to fail. We learn to be upset with each failure and are happy only when we get the results we want. We believe we have to always succeed. The problem is that we aren’t taught how people actually succeed, how they actually get from where they are to where they can say out loud – “I did it!”

When we see others doing what we would like to succeed at doing, we tend to think that it was easy for them. We assume that they didn’t have to go through our struggles and failures. Even when they tell us that the road wasn’t easy, we tend to think that they never really experienced real failure. The truth is that no one succeeds all the time. We all experience failures. The trick is to see failure as an experience to learn from. The difference between people who have “fun” and enjoy life and people who don’t is that some people are judgmental about failure and see it as a very bad thing, while others look at failure as part of learning. They observe failure and think about what they can do differently.

If you do a little research, you will find out that so many great people fail time after time before they succeed in getting the results that they want. You’ve probably heard the story of Thomas Edison who made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." That’s the making of success!!

So, failing might not be a fun day at the beach, but it can be a welcome experience! Each time something doesn’t work out, we can explore and learn what we can do to improve things for the next time. Like a child learning to walk, you can take a step, fall down, get up again until you discover how to get where you want to be.

If you stutter you might be looking at it as failure, failure to get words out, failure to participate, failure to say what you want to say. You might have tried to improve your speech, but you still don't speak fluently. If you think this is failure in a bad way and think you are a failure, you have missed an experience that you can learn from and will not turn on lightbulbs.

Instead look at everything you have done, each time you block or have a repetition as something you do and that’s okay. When you see it without judgment as something you do, you know that this means that you could also explore possible ways to do it differently, to make it easier for you to speak. Doing it differently is possible.

If you stutter, you are not failing. You are experiencing what it is to hold back from expressing yourself freely. If you want to explore how to change this, I’d love to show you the way. Click here and I’ll continue to help you on your way. 

Have a great day! Barbara