If You Knew How To Handle Failure …
Career coach Education: Yesterday a valued colleague of mine said these word to me:
“If you knew how to handle failure then you can do anything – the exams will only get you so far. Less anxious and less fear or failure and then the world is open to you.”
And isn’t that SO true? We bandy around the phrases that ‘Eddison discovered 10,000 ways of not making a lightbulb’, but, in this society, it is VERY difficult to actually put that into practice. What is more important is that inherent in every failure is a real nugget of learning. If we can be encouraged to actively seek out that learning and apply it next time then the iterations will be endlessly positive.
Career Coach Education
If we were taught how to handle failure and if we were taught that its forgivable. If we were taught that if it hurts then we must take care of ourselves and that there will always be something useful in failure and this is what we must seek out. That this invaluable information will be important in our personal and professional worlds. Wouldn’t risk-taking be made easier and wouldn’t the learning be much more valued? I read things like Creativity inc and whilst it is inspiring it does also feel like their kinda “success from failure” feels like its “out there” and that is what others can do. How do we internalise that for ourselves?
“its not the managers job to prevent risks. It is the managers job to make it safe for others to take them”
I am a survivor. There are a series of professionals agree that logically I should not still be here. I know what its like to make mistakes, near-fatal ones and to come back from that and make a really good life. And yet, even I can be really wary of taking risks in case I Fail.
- I have learned to take them incrementally.
- I have learned to be supported as I take them.
- I have learned that those things that didn’t work out might well not have done so for good reason.
- I have learned that fear and excitement are very finely divided.. I have learned that elation of success is awesome.
- I have learned that I am still alive at the end of the day.even if I am a little bruised.
- I do still fear failure and that kind of perfectionism can have me never even starting A Thing…now THAT is a missed opportunity!