Celebrate your failures.
“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”
— Mahatma Gandhi.
THE LOWDOWN
Let’s be honest, failing hurts. After all the work, all the hours and all the hopeful anticipation, failing can give you a feeling of defeat and unworthiness, guilt, regret, remorse, inadequacy, etc. and can lead you to believe that it was all for for nothing. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. We propose next time you feel you’ve failed at something you try a different approach that may seem completely counter-intuitive: Open up to it and take it in, embrace the failure instead of rejecting it, feel it in your body and try to avoid the blaming, fixing, regretting… game.
Following last week’s booster, this is the perfect complement to understand that success is never without failure, moreover it is essential to success.
This week instead of beating yourself up when something goes wrong and putting down your own intelligence or abilities, try getting some perspective, even try throwing a bit of sense of humour. Pause and take in the pain and disappointment that failure has caused you. Accept it as part of your human life experience and then, instead of letting the negative thoughts dictate your next move, own your story by focusing hard on the lesson it teaches you, how it’s taking you a step closer to your goal, and celebrate you are still there, showing up and giving it your best, which shows a great deal of courage and resilience.
WHY IS IT GOOD?
In an interview with Time magazine, Brené Brown explains “If you cannot manage discomfort, that sends you barrelling into perfectionism, excuse making, blame, rationalizing, fixing it, cleaning it up without taking away the key learnings from a failure or a disappointment, or even a heartbreak.”
Failure also makes us more compassionate and empathetic and being able to recover from our failures helps us to develop the confidence to take more risks and live more wholeheartedly.
Here’s one of many examples to keep you inspired:
Richard Branson. Failed ventures: Virgin Cola, Virgin Clothes, Virgin Money, Virgin Vie, Virgin Vision, Virgin Vodka, Virgin Wine, Virgin Jeans, Virgin Cosmetics, Virgin Cars and Virgin Brides (no surprise here). There you have it, a collection of failures!
SOME IDEAS
We thought it’d be a good idea to get some practice starting with small failures that will help you build up more resilience. Some examples:
You burn your toast in the morning.
Your computer crashes and you didn’t save the work.
You miss an opportunity for not taking action.
You misunderstand something and give a random answer.
You send a sexy pic to your father/mother-in-law… What? Yeah, by mistake of course!
You take a risk against everyone’s advice and you fail miserably… OK, this one might be for stage 2, the “Not So Small Failures” phase.
EXTRA BROWNIE POINTS
You’ll be glad to know that you’re not alone in failing. Share your humanness with others that fail as well as you do by joining the TIFU (Today I Fucked Up) community and share your story with good humour: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/
Keep celebrating!
Vero and Enrique
Choose your rhythm.
Kensho Life
Please help us spread happiness by sharing the boosters!
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