Creating Failures
“Success is moving from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
I so frequently stop or get stagnant when the stench of failure wafts into my life so as to avoid being enmeshed by it at all costs. In actuality, this is a surefire way to avoid ever being successful.
You HAVE to fail over and over again in order to learn how to create success for yourself. Failures provide learning and growth. They simply reflect something that did not work and point you in the direction of what will.
Yet most of us consider them to be these big, scary, horrible experiences. We spend so much time and energy avoiding having to deal with failure that we never even get the chance to show how naturally creative and powerful we are.
The cosmic joke is that we’re meant to develop and evolve; to expand our capacity for love, compassion, patience and generosity. But we want all that juicy end stuff without any of the work it takes to get there. Yet it takes work. And that work involves lots and lots of ‘failures’.
What I see for myself is that if I truly start welcoming failures, it would diffuse some of the anxiety and significance I’ve created around the expectation I currently have of what the experience has to be. Places where I’ve feared hearing answers I don’t want to hear, or fear that I won’t actually make a difference, will no longer be so confronting because I wouldn’t be pre-planning the lashing I’d give myself if things don’t go smoothly. Because as I’ve mentioned before, I’m highly skilled at beating myself up. I think if I go from failure to failure enthusiastically, it will be life-giving. I will be able to step into absolutely anything without judgment or predisposed conceptions of how it has to go. From that place, success is inevitable.
What would be in it for you to take on failing masterfully? What space do you see might open up for you if your view shifted from failure as disastrous to failure as delightful?