So many of us spend our lives and limited resources trying our hardest not to fail. It’s only natural – after all, we want to succeed! We want all the fun things that come with success, so we’ll do whatever we can to make it happen.
But what if I told you that one of the biggest things we could do to be successful was to embrace failure? To actively welcome it and find the joy in getting things wrong.
If you read that and felt a visceral shudder somewhere in your body, I promise you, you’re not alone. I (Pk) am an AuDHDer (Autistic with ADHD) and failure has always been something to avoid at all costs.
Until recently.
The problem with trying desperately to avoid failure is that often in doing so, I couldn’t take the steps I needed to take to succeed either. Because failure and success aren’t necessarily opposites, but different versions of the same thing.
Failure and success have connotations of bad and good respectively, but if we take away the baggage and reframe things, then they don’t have to be either.
Let’s work an example. Let’s say you’re starting a new business, you’ve just launched a product, you’ve done your market research, you’ve got it ready to go. But no one buys it. Not a single person. You’ve failed.
Or have you?
You can choose to look at this as a failing or you can choose to see it as an opportunity to learn and grow. Yes, it’s rubbish that no one’s buying what you’re selling, but let’s look at what you actually did. You put in the work, tried something out, and it didn’t stick.
So it’s time to look at the causes. It’s time to reflect, to tinker and to try again. And the best part is? You have way more skills to do it with this time around!
It may sound counter-intuitive but what if we took the time to celebrate failures? I’m not saying toxic positivity you have to feel happy about it, but what I am saying is that a failure can be a good thing.
And if you want to succeed, then you need to get comfortable failing. Sometimes, you’ll get things wrong. Sometimes things just won’t go the way you thought. And that’s okay! Take the time you need to process, and then look at what you can learn.
The more afraid of failure you are, the more afraid of success you will be.
Getting comfortable with failure is hard work (and it’s still a work in progress for me) but here are some tips that may help:
- Do not push away your emotions. In my experience when you push away emotions, they push back. You shove them away and then they come back in more extreme ways to make themselves heard. Think about times when someone dismissed you continuously. Did you eventually snap? Did you get angrier and more frustrated each time?
- Take a pause if you need. There is so much pressure on us to be productive all of the time. If you’ve just had a big setback or a failure, then you need to process things. Take the time you need to get into a headspace where you can re-examine this.
- Stay curious. Look at what you know, what you have learned and explore what you might do differently. We are often kinder to others than ourselves, so imagine that it was a friend, partner, family member etc. who this situation has happened to. What might you advise them? Would you judge them (maybe a little, but you probably wouldn’t add salt to their wounds and tell them would you?)?
- Talk about it. The more we talk about our own mistakes, the safer it is for other people to talk about theirs. It also gives us an opportunity to learn from others, and if you’re like me, it can be helpful to talk things through. If talking doesn’t work for you, perhaps try journalling or stream of consciousness. You could try a combination of both.
- Practice. You’re going to make mistakes – you’re human! When you get things wrong, let it be wrong for a bit and then correct it. Own that you made the mistake, and then correct it. Start small, maybe you sent a typo in a text. Let that mistake be there, practice the above and then correct it.
Ultimately, the best piece of advice is to stop looking at failures as failures. They’re learning opportunities. They’re a chance for you to prove that you’re human. They can be a chance to grow.
How do you deal with failure?
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