UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPSTS ARE NOT FAILURES by Michael Josephson

Unsuccessful attempts are not failures unless they so discourage you that you abandon further efforts to achieve your goal. Even then, the venture or effort may be a failure but you are not. Failure is an event not a character trait.

If one insists on calling all unsuccessful efforts failures the meaning of failure is really quite benign. When trying anything new or taking on any challenge, unsuccessful efforts are an essential aspect of skill building.

Failure is much easier to handle if you just think of it as feedback to guide your next effort.

Anne Josephson (my former wife) runs the nation's largest gymnastic academies. I've learned a lot about the way they differentiate between a fall and a failure.

When a gymnast wants to learn a difficult new skill on a balance beam, she will fall off the beam many times before she masters the skill. No one who understands the task would think of the falls as failures. It’s called practice. Even if she falls during a competition, though there is greater disappointment, it’s the same thing.

A fall is not a failure because every performance builds experience and skill; it's an essential part of the ongoing process of improvement. Performing a skill in a competition before an audience in a situation where the performance will be judged and graded is very different than performing in practice, but it's nothing more than an advanced stage of practice - performing when the stakes are greater.

The gymnast must build the skill of competitive performance in the same way she built the underlying skill – through practice and experience.?The more she does it, the better she will become. With this attitude she will more quickly and completely rebound from frustrations and disappointments, pick herself up and get back on the beam because she wants to build skills and experience so she will be better the next time, and the next time, and the next time.

It is the same with parenting, management and every other important endeavor. Confidence doesn't mean you are certain of success, but that you are certain that even an unsuccessful effort can be a stepping stone.

It's been said that It too Edison over 1,000 tries to get the light bulb filament right. When asked how he had the fortitude to to endure so many failures he said, "I never failed. Each effort taught me what wouldn't work and got me closer to what would." Some have called this "failing forward."