A significant component of setting and striving for goals is understanding that fundamentally, many of us fear making mistakes which, when it comes to your goals, is akin to dragging ten horses.
Back in the sexy ’70s when I was traversing my pimply and troubled youth, failure certainly wasn’t celebrated and I think that’s worse now.
Failure is where the real success is, and if we are to build resilience in the next generation, we need to come to an agreement in our micro-communities about how we make failure okay, how we actually celebrate it. At the dinner table, in our sporting clubs and in our peer groups, we need to have a conversation that encourages a good old-fashioned ‘stuff up’ as acknowledgement of a risk taken and lessons learned.
Put failure in the context of learning to walk, talk, drive a car and play video games. If you’re like me, you didn’t come out of the womb knowing how to do this stuff, but we learn by falling over, stuffing up and being beaten on the battlefield. Failure is not you, it’s what happens to you in the pursuit of growth, and each of our successes is actually a journey of failures. ‘Success’ is but a nanosecond. How long has it been since you took a serious risk and failed? If you have kids, when was the last time you gave them a fist pump for taking a risk, especially one that led to failure? If you have staff, when was the last time you offered an encouraging and empathetic smile when Plan A didn’t go to plan? When was the last time you re-framed one of your mistakes only to discover its silver lining?
Bless your mistakes, as not making them is the goal of a dead man!