Dealing With Failure

Failure is such a fear-based word…it conjures up all kinds of weak, disempowering feelings so of course we want to avoid feeling that. As with most things, the problem isn’t actually the word, it’s our perception of the word. We perceive failure as bad and therefore it conjures up “bad” feelings.

If you take the fear away from the word failure and look what it’s representing, it is an attempt at accomplishing something without successfully completing the task, a lack of success at something. Why should there be a negative attachment to something that not only happens every day, but is literally a necessary part of accomplishing anything?

No one ever accomplished anything without failing at certain parts first. As babies we failed at walking numerous times, at learning the language we speak literally countless times, holding a spoon, a pencil, times tables in math, etc. Literally everything we do is based on foundational pieces that we had countless failures at. And yet no one (including us), decided it would be a good idea to give up trying to walk after two attempts because we just weren’t getting it.

We have an unconscious desire for our lives to be a straight line with no learning curves, no growth, no evolution, no stretching and no uncomfortability. This is not life. Life is about constantly stretching, becoming more of ourselves, expanding like the Universe expands, evolving, growing in new exciting ways!

As a parent, a former personal trainer and a Life Coach, I have the privilege of helping people achieve things they couldn’t achieve before…what a blessing! The joy on a child’s face when they walk for the first time, the sense of pride an adult experiences when jumping up on a platform when they never thought that was possible, the overcoming of personal traumas and blocks to find peace and happiness that is yearned for…it’s amazing, exhilarating and life-affirming. It literally makes you feel more alive and that’s because when you do things like this you ARE more alive. It opens up the flow of life-force energy that flows through us and gives us enthusiasm for life!

This simply isn’t possible without the risk of failure. If you knew you were going to be able to do something and you do it, where’s the excitement, where’s the joy? If someone came up and said: “I can’t believe you did that, that’s amazing!”. You’d say: “well, maybe to you because you haven’t done it but I’ve done it many times so it’s not that big a deal anymore”. We have to have risk to receive reward.

And speaking of risk…is that even really a thing? Looking at it closely, we’re really not risking much in most situations. What’s going to happen if we fail? We could just try again, find another way, learn from it, grow, etc. If we take the negative mental construct away, we see that failure and risk isn’t really anything that we need to be afraid of. If we accept it as part of our journey, we’ll just learn from it, become stronger, more capable through our experiences and succeed at a later date. It’s okay, in fact it’s expected!

Take a moment to look deeper into the fear that is holding you back and find there’s nothing to be afraid of. Fear lives in unexamined belief systems. Go deeper, dissect what you base your life on to see if it’s true instead of accepting limiting beliefs as they are. Once dissected, you’ll see that most of our fear is unfounded and unnecessary. How empowering and life-affirming is that?!?!