Failure can feel like a bad thing. You may experience feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment, or unworthiness when you have failed at something. These feelings can stem from what we have been taught about failure. For example, you may have learned that failure is unacceptable, and maybe your parents shamed you when you failed. As a part of your healing journey, you can rewire your thoughts about failure. You can learn to celebrate your failures. Here are 3 reasons to celebrate your failures.
1. Failure Creates Resiliency
A failure doesn’t have to be the end of you. Instead, it can be an opportunity to build your window of tolerance. Your window of tolerance is the range in which you can cope with stressful things without going into fight, flight, freeze mode. The more you fail and realize you can survive and recover from it, the wider your window of tolerance gets. This widening of your window of tolerance then builds a stronger foundation for resiliency.
Example: If you have to give a speech and fear talking in front of people, you may experience body shakes when you begin to speak. Then all of a sudden, you forget the words in your speech. You fumble with your words, and you are mortified. You somehow end the speech and feel like you messed that up. Congratulation, you failed! How exciting! You put yourself out there, and it didn’t work. You know what else happened? You survived. You can work on how to recover when you forget the words in your speech. You also widened your window of tolerance. When you fumbled on your speech, if you didn’t go into your fight, flight, freeze mode, you were inside your window of tolerance. You strengthened your ability to be inside your window tolerance, causing it to grow wider. Yay for resiliency!
2. Failure Creates Opportunities To Learn
Failure can be an opportunity to learn more about whatever you failed at. For example, if you are making a cake that tastes horrible, you can go back and figure out what went wrong. You have an opportunity to learn more about baking and the science behind it. A nasty cake doesn’t mean you are a horrible baker. It just means you made a nasty cake. You get to decide what meaning the bad cake takes on.
3. Failure Creates Opportunities To Learn About Yourself
If your kid asks a million questions and you yell at them to shut up, this can feel like a parenting failure. However, your kids are curious, and it’s part of your role to guide them in their curiosity. Take time to reflect on what brought up this anger. Did you feel stupid for not knowing the answer to the question? Is your battery drained from a long day at work? Is this how your parents treated you?
This insight allows you to learn about yourself and heal. If you don’t know the answer, you need to remind yourself it’s okay not to know everything. It doesn’t make you stupid. If your battery is drained, find a way to get a charge throughout the day. (Check out his blog for more on self-care every day) If your parents treated you this way, it’s time to be aware of what trauma you are passing down to your children.
Failure doesn’t have to be bad, though many of us take it that way. The feelings of shame and embarrassment will not last forever. The key takeaway is that you get to decide how to make meaning out of your failure. It doesn’t have to be the end of your existence. It can be an opportunity to grow, learn, and build resiliency. You decide.
What is something you learned from a past failure? Tell me in the comments.
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