Chances are, you saw the title to this post and your mind immediately went to a negative place. Nobody likes to hear that they will fail at something. Nobody likes to feel disappointment, nobody likes to feel embarrassment, nobody likes to feel ridiculed.
All of our lives, we’ve heard phrases like, “Failure is not an option”. People have been conditioned to have the term “failure” associated with “loser” via television programs, and all our lives, we are told things like, “no one remembers 2nd place”. It’s all true, for the most part. The glory goes to the winners. It goes to those that come in first place, win championships, make the most money, win gold medals, etc.
What we’re rarely told, though, is that failure is actually a good thing. It’s one of the most helpful learning experiences we can have in life. It’s something that we should be ok with, something we should come to expect, but more importantly, something we should look forward to coming back from.
We start out with a fresh slate when we’re born. We observe our surroundings, we observe our parents, grandparents, siblings, etc. We see them walking around and at some point, we decide we have to do it, too.
Those first times we tried to take a step, we probably fell. Some of us cried, some of us didn’t. Most were met with encouragement and praise from our parents. “That’s ok, honey. Try again.” And we did. The encouraging words and tone of our parents kept us going and kept us trying until we achieved our goal. Some of us picked it up quicker than others, but we all eventually did it. We learned to walk. We overcame that first fall, that first failure. We kept going.
That’s when we started to get into trouble. We started getting into things we shouldn’t be getting into, we started touching things around the house our parents didn’t want us touching, we started to hear the word “no” for the first time and we heard it often. “No, don’t touch that, you’ll get hurt.” “No don’t touch that, you’ll break it.” “No, you can’t do that.” You get the picture. Obviously our parents wanted to shield us from harm, but that negative programming stayed with a lot of us.
We grew up and subconsciously, we kept hearing “No” whenever we thought about stepping out of our comfort zone and trying something new. We hear “No” whenever we think about trying something that may result in us failing or feeling the slightest bit of pain.
Just imagine if when we were trying and learning to take our first steps, our parents instead of encouraging us and helping us up to try again, chastised us and told us “No. Stay down. Don’t try again or you’ll fall down and get hurt.” How many of us would be walking?
Instead of being afraid of failing, we should instead accept it as a vital part of the learning process of the human experience. Everybody fails. Everything, from stubbing your toe on the coffee table to saying something that unintentionally hurts someone’s feelings can be considered a fail.
The important thing is that we learn from our failures, no matter how mundane or monumentally epic, and try and do better next time.
You WILL miss workouts, you WILL cheat on your diet, you WILL make mistakes, but the important thing is to learn from the experience, not dwell on it, and do your best not to repeat it.
The next time you want to try something and that little voice inside your head tells you, “No”, just remember that the only true way to fail at something, is to never even try to begin with.
Always activate. Get going.
Alex Arion