From the moment we are born, I believe we are wired to take risks, fail, and try again. Think of babies learning to walk, falling down, and getting back up again. In fact, childhood is supposed to be all about trying, sometimes succeeding, often failing, and always learning. It’s called play. The very definition of play is to take risks, test out countless activities and personas, reject the ones that don’t feel quite right, and tweak and hone the others to ultimately discover who we are at our core, what lights us up.
But at some point, many of us become much less comfortable with the idea of failure. We focus on performance and the end result, on acquiring skills and engaging in adult-led activities that are judged, graded and ranked. We lose sight of the valuable learning that grows out of all the trying — the exploration and the discovery.
Research shows that fear of failure paired with feelings of incompetence can lead to self-sabotaging kind of procrastination. Basically, if you're afraid of failure and you don’t believe in yourself, then you’re probably going to fail simply by not trying. Conversely, if you're somewhat afraid to fail but you consider yourself capable of achieving your goals, then you’re more likely to succeed.
Failure is such a negative word that it seems strange to suggest that it can be a good thing. How many times have you looked back on your life, thought of mistakes you’ve made, and kicked yourself over them? I know I sure have. I have had many failures in my life. I have lost a job; I have mismanaged my money, and I have had trouble in relationships. But life goes on as it should.
You see many people allow failure to hold them back when in reality failure can be a good thing! Fear of failure prevents many people from following their dreams of having a go at something new. Fear of failing is a failure in itself because it holds back so many would-be success stories. I often remember what Zig Ziglar once said, “A failure is an event, not a person.” How profound is that?!
Here are just a few ways failure can be good for us.
Failure helps you grow
When your efforts don't work out, you have to reach deep inside to find the strength to try again. To solve the problem and make sure you get the desired result, you need to extend yourself and so you grow. You need to stretch and possibly move outside your comfort zone. After experiencing failure, you will never be the same as you were before you tried. You don’t know how far you can go until you have tried and failed.
Failure provides answers
If you don’t try and fail, you will never know if your idea or method is going to work. You spend time worrying that you don’t have the answer; you wonder whether it would have worked. The pain of regret is far worse than the pain of failure. When you fail, you can start again; with regret, you will never know.
Failure creates new opportunities
Many people believe that everything happens for a reason, we just don’t know what it is at the time. Failures often bring unforeseen opportunities that would not have been available without the failure in the first place. You often need to close one door so that another door of opportunity can be opened for you. Failure is a way of one door closing. Failure is seldom the end; it is often a bright beginning.
Failure means you have courage
Even though you didn’t get the results you wanted, at least you were trying to do something. So many people let the fear of failure prevent them from reaching for their dreams. So don’t be worried about a failure – at least you had the courage to have a go. Courage is not the absence of fear; it is feeling the fear and taking action anyway. When you have a go, despite the possibility of failure, you show that you have great courage.
No one likes to fail, and that makes perfect sense. Failure doesn’t feel good, and it usually costs us a sizable chunk of money, time, and dignity. On top of that, comebacks are exhausting. Here’s the thing, though: to some degree, failure is an inevitable part of life. Whether they’re big or small, none of us can avoid experiencing setbacks from time to time — and that’s OK. In fact, it’s more than just OK to fail — it’s necessary. According to successful people and researchers alike, failure is actually good for us for a number of reasons. Failure makes us far more interesting because we learn from failure than success. It turns out that learning how to bounce back from failure is a valuable skill to possess if you want to succeed.
So whether you feel like a failure right now or not, it’s important to realize that failure is a healthy part of life.
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