Failure is an Option
(Photo of me doing some planning - hoping I don’t fail!)
Does this sound familiar? You wake up in the morning with the BEST idea for a new short story. All of the characters are there with their arcs. You can see the setting and even have some clue how it will end.
But when it comes time to write you start thinking: What if nobody reads this? Or what if people read it and they don’t like it? What if this is the worst story I’ve ever written?
Instead of putting pen to paper you let the characters slip away and leave writing for later.
Or, maybe you’re a yoga teacher and you have an awesome idea for a yoga workshop. You know what you’ll focus on. And you know how to teach it in a new way to help your students. Everything is coming together in your mind.
But when it’s time to start working on it, you start worrying. What if nobody comes? What if they don’t get it? What if I forget what to teach them?
Instead of planning the workshop you set it aside and keep your teaching small.
A lot of creatives and yoga teachers have some variation of this problem. They
have plenty of inspiration for great work. But as soon as they think about doing something new the “What if I Fail” myth comes up. They put the breaks on the whole thing and never make the art, teach the workshop, or otherwise progress.
You might think that your problem is that you don’t have the willpower to start on your project. But, I think the problem has to do with what you think about failure.
THE MYTH ABOUT FAILURE
Many of us were taught that success is what’s most important. And that failure is the opposite of success. If failure is the opposite of success then it must be a bad thing. And if it’s a bad thing, we think we should avoid it at all costs. Even if that means not even starting.
It’s not so hard to talk yourself out of starting if you’re believing the “Failure is a bad thing” myth. All you have to do is imagine any number of ways you could “fail”, put a What If... in front of that image and you’re set up to stop. Your mind says: “What if you Fail?” and your creativity disappears.
What’s stopping you is that you believe the myth that failure is a bad thing. But what if the whole myth we’ve been taught about failure isn’t true? What if failure is actually a very good thing?
Let’s explore....
FAILURE LETS YOU KNOW WHAT’S NOT WORKING
Failure gives you direct and clear feedback on what you’re doing. Instead of beating yourself up for trying something and failing, if you take the time to reflect on it, you can very quickly pinpoint what worked and what didn’t.
For example, in the case of low turnout for a yoga workshop, your failure can help you figure out what happened. By talking to your students you might find out that your marketing wasn’t clear. Or that the scheduled time wasn’t great for them. Or that your topic didn’t hit home. Now that you know what didn’t work, you can make changes for your next workshop to help it go better.
FAILURE HELPS YOU LEARN FAST
We don’t like to get things wrong. And we often see our failures as ways that things went wrong. Because we’re SO against getting it wrong again, our brains store the information that we messed up on where we can access it quickly and not make the same mistake twice.
This happened for me in 9th grade when I got a question wrong about measuring the circumference of the Earth. I will always remember that it’s more accurate to measure in millimeters than kilometers because I missed the question on the quiz. That tiny bit of information is BURNED into my brain.
I got most of the other questions on the test right. Then, I promptly forgot most the information. I got a good grade, but if the point was to teach me something then the most successful question on the test was the one I failed.
By failing I learned.
WELCOMING FAILURE
If you want to do more than have great ideas that never happen, you’re going to have to get started. And getting started involves the risk of failure. My suggestion is to bring failure along on the journey and to welcome it as part of your growth.
TRY THIS:
Make something badly.
if you’re an artist, make bad art.
if you’re a yoga teacher gather friends and teach them a horrible yoga class.
if you’re a knitter, get the gauge all wrong.
It seems counterintuitive, but actually TRY to fail. Give yourself full permission to be terrible at what you’re making.
Afterwards
Notice that you didn’t fall apart. (and you may have had some fun)
Look back at what you’ve done and very kindly give yourself some feedback
Ask yourself what you learned from this “failure”
If you do this exercise you may learn something really useful that you can bring to your next project.
FAILURE IS PART OF SUCCESS
To quote Karamo Brown from Queer Eye, “Failure isn’t the opposite of success, it’s part of it.”
Your creativity, your practices, your expressions are so important. If you can embrace failure as part of the journey - part that helps you figure out what works and what doesn’t, part that helps you learn quickly - you’ll start moving yourself and your work forward instead of staying stuck.
Being willing to welcome failure will serve you in every part of your life. You’ll be able to mess up in your friendships and intimate relationships and learn from it. And as you repair your mistakes, you’ll make the relationships stronger. You’ll be able to explore any part of your life - career, body image, self-talk - not as things you’re failing at, but as things that help you learn and grow.
LOVE YOUR WAY THROUGH FAILURE
My sincere hope is that we can learn to love our way through our failures. That means seeing them as giving feedback - not as a reason to beat ourselves down. Loving your way through failure means graciously accepting the learning that comes with it. And it means remembering that you are enough even as you learn and evolve.
Loving your way through failure sets you up to learn to welcome failure as part of your process. To even get good at it and let it refine you. When you do that, your successes are that much sweeter.