Failure: The Most Daunting of F-words

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”  -Japanese proverb

Let’s get it out there: Everyone, and I mean everyone, fails at some point in their lives.  And if we’re really being honest, most people fail multiple times in their lives at several things – whether it’s in their relationships, jobs, school, or other personal goals.  Failures can be of small or large magnitude.  They can be predicted or unexpected.  They can be relatively mild or excruciatingly painful.  But, one thing is certain: Failure is inevitable at some point – and it is always instructive, should we choose to view it that way. 

Unfortunately, we often associate failure with feeling ashamed and unworthy.  Because these feelings are typically unpleasant, many of us go out of our way to avoid failure, and therefore we avoid taking risks that may help us grow, regardless of the outcome.  And when we fail in an especially painful way, our reactions to the darkness of the experience may lead us to isolate ourselves from others in a protective cocoon.

But if failure is a universal human experience, why do we sometimes treat it like a permanent stamp on our character that makes us less worthy of the good things in life?  It doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s challenging to alter our perceptions of failure in a culture that rewards getting ahead, moving upward, and being correct.  What we often forget, however, is that “getting ahead” is a bumpy trajectory – and it almost never progresses in a linear fashion.  We go up, and then we mess up and things go south.  But once we recover from the initial shock of being off-track, we can recognize those temporary setbacks for what they truly are: Simple indicators that something about our approach isn’t working.  Wouldn’t we want to know if there’s a fundamental flaw in the approach we use to pursue our goals?  If we stumble upon those flaws earlier, we have more of an opportunity to correct them before they grow even bigger.  Failure, in this sense, can be a huge blessing.  What makes it so daunting, unfortunately, is how much negativity we attach to it, as well as how hard it can sometimes be to figure out what went wrong.

We don’t need to treat failures as black marks against our character.  Yes, we may have screwed up on something – maybe badly – and maybe in a way that we should have known better.  But, if we’re going to be true to those ideals of moving forward and improving ourselves, the only constructive thing to do is to figure out where we went wrong, and then make every effort to correct it.  Once we do that in earnest, we are essentially trying again more intelligently.  We can’t waste too much time kicking ourselves, because then we miss our chance to capitalize on the learning opportunities inherent in the failure process.

After a few (or a million, we never know) cycles of trying, failing, revising, and trying again, we eventually stumble upon our success.  And as we move closer to that success, we begin to see that the entire process was steering us in that direction all along.

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