How I changed my mind-set: The power of believing that I can grow.
Our society is very much hardwired for success. Successful people, successful careers, successful lives… On the opposite side of success, there seems to stand… failure. And failure can feel crappy. Failure can feel miserable. Failure can feel lousy. Failure could sometimes feel so uncomfortable that I wanted to avoid it. I started at times to fear it. But failure is a man-made concept. It is subjective. Failure has no meaning in itself. We, humans, are attaching meaning to it. It is us, humans, who choose how we look at failure. It is up to me to choose how to perceive it. And I chose to make it empowering. To me now, FAIL means ‘First Attempt at Learning’. Failure is a teacher. Failure shows that something needs to change.
Truly successful people have failed a lot in their journey, even more than average. The key is that they kept trying and trying, over and over again… and they learned each time from their mistakes. They used each ‘failure’ to improve, to change and to grow. I recently ‘failed’ at an exam that was important to me. I would lie if I would say it did not feel painful. In the past, I would have felt ashamed and would have feared the judgement of others, let alone self-criticism and self-doubt about not being (good) enough. But by ‘failing’ that exam, I learned a great lesson that day about myself so… I was actually grateful for failing. By failing, I was given feedback on what I could do better next time. By failing, I was offered a golden opportunity to grow. I learned something I did not know before.
My peers called it resilience, the way I looked at this failure. They complimented me for it. I call it a growth mind-set. You cannot learn unless you are prepared to fail. You cannot grow unless you are prepared to fail. You cannot thrive unless you are prepared to fail. You cannot be successful unless you are prepared to fail. Failure teaches us how to become successful. Imagine how the world would look like if legends like Thomas Edison would have stopped after their so-called ‘failures’: He failed like 10.000 times before he managed to invent the light bulb. And what would the world look like today without lamps and artificial light? Edison did not view his attempts as failures. He viewed them as experiments from which he could learn.
So, I loosened up. I learned to approach everything as an experiment. All life is an experiment. And the more experiments I perform, the more failures I will likely encounter. And, more failures will provide me with more opportunities to grow and become a better version of myself. I try to approach now everything in life like a scientist: experiment and test what works and what does not work. Be excited to learn and not afraid of failing.
When one of my three teenage daughters fails at something or makes an error, I try to ask them: What did you learn from it? What is the improvement you could make next time you come across this kind of challenge? As they are teens, they often roll their eyes at their mother when she tries to teach them something… but the seed I plant leads increasingly to spontaneous stories about the lessons they learned from a mistake. I hope this will create a ripple effect… so that the next generation will stop to fear failure and will embrace the opportunity to learn and grow. And celebrate this!
Life has taught me that my daughters cannot expect to be good (let alone perfect) at something when they are just trying out something new. Either this would be unrealistic or it would mean that they have not been challenged enough. I try not to praise their talents but rather their efforts, their perseverance and, above all, the improvements they make. I try to reward the process. I try to encourage, so to speak, their failures.
Failing means learning and there is nothing inherently bad in learning. So, failure is not the enemy. Fear is. Let the fear not stop us and let us say yes to new opportunities. Say yes to new experiments. Yes to life. I tell myself I should get up as many times as I fall. And become each time smarter and wiser. This is the attitude that will lead me to success. It will help me improve and become a better version of myself. Each day. So, I do not fear failure anymore. I embrace it. Celebrate it.
I love to learn. You too? Rewire your brain and embrace a growth mind-set.