Fantastic Fuckups and Failures

Welp, I’ve failed to write and publish this April blog for 3 weeks now. If you count my original goal to have all blog writing done back in December, then I also failed there too.  I don’t always feel creative so I set out to write several blogs at once during the times I’m flowing in my creative zone.  Clearly, I missed that mark altho I do know it’s still something I want to achieve on a regular basis. Best laid plans…

Failing at things has never been something I sought out.  Failure left a bad taste in my mouth and definitely wasn’t something to be celebrated or encouraged.  Growing up I put a ton of pressure on myself to be perfect.  Perfect grades.  Perfectly polite.  Perfectly smiling and being good.  It wasn’t so much a direct message I received from any one person to be perfect and therefore successful.  This was my interpretation of what I saw around me and how I internalized that to mean I needed to be perfect.  I was really good at the things I tried to do that I had complete certainty I would excel at.  I went after those easily because I believed in my ability to succeed.  

But trying something new where I didn’t know for sure I would succeed?  Well that didn’t happen so often and the more I got used to not trying something new, the easier it became to fear failure and stop taking risks.  

Failure creeps up for me in different ways too. Or at least how my mind interprets when I make a mistake or fail at something.  It’s those times we spend reviewing over and over what happened in some attempt to rewrite the past.  We replay unpleasant or disappointing events in our minds eye seeking out that thing we did that fucked it all up.  Understanding ourselves and decisions we make is important to evolving, however if it kicks into overdrive and begins to snowball into negative storytelling about ourselves, we’ve hit a roadblock.  We begin to fear we will fuck up again, which leads to us trying less and stunts our growth. Everyone is a novice at the beginning. EVERYONE.  We learned to read, to crawl, to walk, to play sports, to drive a car. We begin at the beginning and we learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s the same when we get older but if we focus on the failing as a negative, we block off our willingness to fail any more than we absolutely have to.  

Failure is a natural and expected part of success.  If you’re gonna be in business for yourself, failure is for sure a part of the infinite game.  So I’m challenging you and myself to redefine failure.  How do you want to feel about it?  What if you switched your perspective and saw failure as part of the process, perhaps even a fun part?  What if you couldn’t get it wrong?  

Start there and ask yourself “What if I couldn’t get this thing or this decision wrong?”  May you go forth and fail with fun and grace.  May you fuck up here and there.  May you unfuck your failure vibe and lean into your edge.  Dare to fail.