I recently heard failure being referred to as a “Dirty Word”.
As in, why would we want to talk about failure or acknowledge it?
The other day when we were walking the dog, my kids wanted to play two truths and a lie. They love this game!
When it was my turn I racked my brain. I wanted to stump them. (I just might be a little competitive)
Here’s what I came up with:
- I’ve had 3 piercings
- I never failed a drivers test
- I took my first swimming lesson when I was in college.
What’s your guess??
The lie was that I never failed a driver’s test.
They all assumed this one was true. Probably because they witness my amazing driving skills daily!
I got to tell them that I actually did fail a driver’s test and that I believe that the reason I am such a great driver now is that I failed the first time and had to try again.
I told them how humiliated and hard that fail was at the time.
I told them that looking back I am so glad I failed.
I am so much more experienced and prepared on the road because of it, not to mention more experienced in failure.
As I explained this to them it reinforced my beliefs about failure even more.
Failing is not shameful, dirty, or bad.
Failing is actually the opposite.
As we fail more, we learn more, as we learn more we can be more.
I think the reason failure gets such a dirty wrap sometimes is because of what we make it mean about us.
Attaching our worth to our failures and successes keeps us turned in.
To fail forward we must be looking out for what we can learn.
It is a challenge to welcome failure, but we can get better at it by working on our beliefs about it.
Instead of avoiding that ‘dirty word’ choose to embrace it with the attitude that it’s refining you and allowing you to become the 2.0 version of yourself!
