You Ready to Fail?

Watching people bang their heads against the wall in frustration and becoming discouraged at their inability to change their situation was always difficult. You would know that they wanted change, but they seemed unable to get out of their own way in the process.

Part of the problem was their unwillingness to see and admit to the reasons for their failure. They would either blame it on outside forces, or just decide that the task was too difficult or not worth the effort. In essence, they would give up before they could get going, just because they were unable to examine the reasons for their failure.

Are you willing to look at and admit your failure?

If you’re wanting to improve and change in your life, then you need, no, must, be willing to stare your failure in the face. You have to take the time to understand why the failure happened. This review will provide you with how you can avoid the same mistakes and find ways to be successful in the future.

Failure is success, just delayed.

Without failure to teach, success is just luck. But here’s the rub, if you want to turn that failure into success, you must be willing to review your failure. This means owning the failure for what it is - your failure.

You cannot look away from the failure, blame it on someone or something else, or pretend the failure never happened. You will need to dissect your failure in order to get at the why behind it. Once you start tearing apart your failures you will be able to know what caused them. This then can, and will, help you on your next attempt or project.

Repetition makes it easier.

The first few times you stare at your failure it will be hard to break through the feelings of anger, shame, irritation, disgust, blame, dissociation and desire to pretend it never happened. No one likes to admit to failing. But, we have all failed and will continue to fail throughout our lives. If you look back on your life you will see many instances of failure, large and small. Most of the time our failure does not discourage us, but is something that we utilize to push ourselves forward.

I am certain you have examples in your life where you wanted to achieve something. As you attempted to successfully complete your goal, you found yourself unable to do so, or falling short of what you wanted to accomplish. If the goal was important enough, for example learning to parallel park or a new sport, you then put in more work and time, seeing where you were having issues and then correcting them. You would then practice those areas until you became more competent.

While you may not have consciously looked at what you needed to improve on, or why you failed at what you were attempting, you did some sort of review and found areas you needed to do differently in order to be successful. You continued this process until you were able to complete what you wanted to do.

You will also notice that you likely continued to improve your actions by reviewing ways to get better. It was by doing this over and over you were able to get to the point of success. This process is exactly the same for anything you want to accomplish. It may feel harder, due to the level of stakes you have placed on whatever goal you set, but in the end it is no different. 
Try - Fail - Assess - Try.

Failure leads to improvement, but understanding leads to success.

If you work on being conscious of the process of reviewing your failure and finding the reasons for it, you will be that much better at seeing where or what needs to improve. By understanding the why and what caused your failure you will be able to adjust and improve quicker. If you’re dissecting what and where things fell apart you can then adjust your thinking, emotions, process or people to make sure that things will be done differently or correctly in the future.

Does doing this ensure you of not failing again? Unfortunately, no. The ideas or changes you make may not work, or will lead to another issue you didn’t foresee. But, if you keep reviewing and adapting you will eventually see improvement or another avenue for success that you hadn’t considered. You can only improve if you know why something happened.

Seeing and understanding your failures and the reasons behind them will provide the stepping stones to your future success. Understanding will also help you to reframe failure so that it isn’t this terrible, unsurvivable thing, but a process that you need to go through in order to achieve what you want. The key to this is reviewing the why’s and being honest with yourself about the reasons you failed.

To get good, you must fail. To succeed, you must understand your failure. To be the best you, you must fail. But to truly move beyond your failure you have to know why you failed.

Don’t shy away from the uncomfortableness of reviewing your failures. Hold them up to the light and review the why behind them. This will provide you with tools that make success that much more attainable.