Saturday, February 6, 2016

What Happens When You Fail?

A topic with which I am intimately familiar: avoiding failure.
I tend to bail when things get hard, unfamiliar, mentally challenging.   I like to stick with what I know, what I’m comfortable with, where my skills lie.  Because, you see, I simply do not fail at things.  Really, I don’t.  I never have.  School, my business career, starting our own venture, my personal development challenges… I do not fail.  And to be certain of that, I have learned simply to avoid things at which I have a chance of failure.  It’s a brilliant, fool-proof system.  I take on things I know I can do well, and skip over everything I’m not sure about.  My track record is spotless, of course.  (I did say it was a brilliant system.)
Read more from Melissa: http://whole9life.com/2011/05/thats-not-what-ships-are-for/

As an adult, I've learned the hard way that if you never risk failure, then when you DO fail (and you will, because you do not control the world, sorry), you will have abso-fucking-lutely no idea how to handle it. I've been there. I have failed as an adult, received outcomes I couldn't control despite my perfect inputs, and I didn't manage those failures well at all. They took giant tolls on my brain, and years to recover. (Assuming, of course, I do recover...work in process.)

And I think I could have better learned to handle failure if I had EVER attempted things at which I could fail as a child, when the risks/rewards/payoffs were all quite low. I desperately want to tell parents: STOP protecting your children from failure. Let them fail. In fact, MAKE SURE they fail. Then teach them how to handle failures with grace, learn from them, detach their identity from the outcome, and move on.

Sports seem like a great way to achieve those lessons: their team(s) will never have a perfect record, so there will be utter defeats, crushing disappointments, last-place finishes despite their best efforts...all of which will help you to teach them the only thing that matters, the last part: they gave their best efforts. The effort given is worth celebrating and reinforcing, despite the outcome. If they failed, but gave their best effort, they are not failures.

If you fail, but give your best effort, you are not a failure.

If you fail, you are not a failure.

You are not a failure.

Give your best effort, and celebrate it.

What's the worst that could happen if you faced your fear?
Well, the best thing that could happen is that you could conquer your fear. You could accomplish what you thought you couldn't accomplish. You could become wildly happy and successful.
And you could like it.
Imagine how good you would feel to be free of burden. To feel strong and capable.
Now, is your answer to the first question going to keep you from all that?
-Stephen Covey

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