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Happy Spring and welcome once again to the 5-Minute Life Tune-Up, a quick and concise personal development tool.
For this month, we're taking a closer look at those times when life throws you a curveball and things just don't work out. Yes, we're talking about the "F" word, Failure. You put a lot of effort into whatever you undertake and even so, some projects don't go exactly as planned and some just plain fall flat. This month we'll take a closer look at how failure can be your key to success and how it can actually deepen your learning and be an opening to new and creative thinking.
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How do you feel when you fail?
Tal Ben-Shahar, the wildly popular Positive Psychology professor at Harvard has a slogan he uses in his classes. He tells students they must "Learn to Fail or Fail to Learn". It's an important message for Harvard students, many of whom are under tremendous pressure to succeed. The truth is, all of us have moments when we fall short of our goals - that's a given. But it is our response to those moments that really makes a diffrerence in the long run. One response to failure can leave us drained of confidence and defeated while another can actually be energizing!
What does it mean to "learn to fail" and why is it important? When things don't go as planned, we have a great opportunity to pause to look at what we've done to see what works and what doesn't work. Failing gracefully can help us to pick ourselves up and keep going as opposed to being paralyzed and stymied. Even more importantly, failure is a key element in the concept of "trial and error" without which many creative and innovative ideas would not have been born. Think about it; when we're successful we may feel happy and satisfied, but we don't necessarily learn something new.
Unfortunately, when we fail there is often a big barrier that that prevents us from learning. That barrier is our disappointment and perhaps even anger at failing. Some of us react quite negatively to a failure and this emotional response can get in the way of our learning. Some disappointment is natural, but when we spend a great deal of time and energy feeling bad about ourselves, it can overtake the whole experience and stop any evaluation or creative thinking that might have benefited us. Although transforming a patterned response to failure can be a challenge, it's one worth tackling. We really do have a choice about how we can respond to mistakes and failures.
Here are a few tips for learning to embrace failure:
- Begin
to notice your emotional state after any setbacks or mistakes. If you
tend to be hard on yourself, give yourself a time limit for feeling
bad. Make a conscious decision to let yourself off the hook after a designated period of time, whether it's a few hours or a few days.
- Try out a completely different perspective on failure and mistakes. For example, using humor and lightness: "Oh thank goodness, I'm human...now I can get on with the business of figuring out what went wrong."
- Pay attention to your overall attitude toward failure for yourself and for others. Maybe even the word "failure" with all it's perceived connotations makes you bristle. Consider how you might begin to approach the idea of failure with more gentleness and forgiveness.
- Shift your thinking about evaluations and reviews for work or school.
Gear up for them as an opportunity to learn and to grow in new ways (no matter what the expected results are) -
rather than as something to fear. Trouble gearing up? Seek out a
support from whoever is the "cheerleader" in your life.
- After an experience of failure or defeat, set aside an hour to meet with people involved, or even on your own: brainstorm a list of lessons learned and creative ideas for next time. Don't let the opportunity pass by without using it to your advantage!
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