When It Was OK To Fail
I tried to do it. Every muscle in my body intensified as I tried to move forward. There was a huge smile on my face as I attempted to hold my balance and simultaneously move my leg forward. One step and then…failure! I fell!
I picked myself up and repeated the process over a few more times. The result was the same. Failure. I gave it one more go but this time, I looked up, and there was my mom smiling at me, arms outstretched, encouraging me all the way. Hmm. Multiple failures and yet, here she was telling me I could do it.
What happens? When does failure become unacceptable? When exactly do we begin to feel like failure makes us…well, failures?
Is there something that clicks in us or is society telling that it is no longer acceptable to fail?
We go to school and sometimes, despite our best efforts, we don’t do well in a particular subject area. We aren’t continually encouraged to do better. Instead, we get a finite amount of time to reach a pre-determined standard and compared with others in our classroom.
I get it. Competence is important because it can mean the difference between life or death. But, why is competence in the same areas expected of most at an age when they should be figuring out how to maximize strengths? To fully explore strengths, we need to fail. We need the freedom to fail and the opportunity to be encouraged in our failure.
Ask Orville and Wilbur. Great things are best accomplished when failure is embraced and studied.
So, how do you get back to embracing failure? Not just any failure. Productive failure? You stretch daily! You do something daily that almost guarantees failure with the intention of growing past it.
Robert Schuler and others get credit for asking the question, “What would you attempt if you knew you couldn’t fail?”
That’s just the problem. Too many people are waiting because they are waiting for a time when they know they won’t fail. The better path is embracing failure and learning courage. The road to greatness is discovered by seeking the impossible, so you can know what is possible.
Instead of running FROM failure, find out where it is. That’s where the real learning is.
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About The Author
My name is Robert Kennedy III. I’m a leadership and communication speaker, trainer and author. I recently released 7 Ways To Know You Were Meant To Lead on Amazon. Connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebookor on my website, RobertKennedy3.com.
