4 Things I Learned from Failing Forward
This week I wanted to share 4 things I learned from and about Failing Forward. If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know that one of my goals for this year was to read 12 books that would help my mental well-being this year. My goal is to read one book every month and to share my impressions with you. I decided to start with one of the more difficult concepts for me, the idea of failure.
Failing Forward by John C. Maxwell was a very enlightening read for me. His insight and personal awareness of how many of us are not equipped to fail successfully is what originally drew me to this book. It’s a skill that we all want, but most of us are not emotionally equipped to deal with failure in a positive way.
This book was not a long read, but mentally not a very easy book to read. I found myself rethinking a lot of my assumptions and personal beliefs about failure. Some of which were taught to me as a child and others through situations in life and at work.
From a book that has so much insight, I wanted to share my 4 main learnings into Failing Forward. If you would like to see a short synopsis of this article, I have put in in video form below.
Removing the “You” from Failure
It is easy for us to see failure as being directly linked to who we are as individuals. It’s important that we learn to remove the “you” from failure. Failure should not be linked to our sense of self. The key is rejecting the notion that we are not good enough or unlovable because we made a mistake. Instead we must see failure as just failure. We tried something, it didn’t work, and we move on and learn from it.
We need to treat ourselves with more self-compassion and allow ourselves room to make mistakes. It’s not putting our personal value in our outward performance. It is realizing that we are lovable and valuable just as we are, despite how we performed. The key is to have self-compassion and self-respect for ourselves.
When I realized this, it showed me why I have been so risk averse in so any areas of my life. I can struggle to step out, to try new things being fearful of failure. I struggled with seeing failure as an external situation, but instead internalized it and made it so personal.
It is important to put the correct lens on failure. We must realize that failure happens to us all. We need to have realistic expectations, be willing to learn from our mistakes, to persevere and find new ways to be successful.
The Pain of Failure can Lead to the Fear of Failure
John C. Maxwell writes about how the pain of failure can lead to the fear of failure. He explains how a cycle of fear can keep us from our goals and dreams. He speaks about how fear can lead to inaction. Inaction can prevent us from gaining experience. Inexperience can lead to inability to accomplish our goals. This inability of us to complete the goals we consider important prevents us from stepping out, which brings us back to the living in fear.
When we live in fear, it prevents us from making any forward progress. We may experience feelings of paralysis, procrastination and purposelessness. These can be hard to overcome, but the only way to overcome it is to face our fear and take action anyways. We can’t wait for motivation to come. We just need to start trying. When we try and keep trying, then the motivation will come as a by-product of this effort.
Getting Over Yourself and Dying to Ego
To truly fail forward, we must get over ourselves and die to our egos. I’ve spoken about ego before. It’s not always easy to move past ego to a place of humility. Our ego and pride can ruin us and can prevent us from being the person we are truly meant to be.
An important step is learning not to justify, cover up or give up because you’ve failed. It’s about understanding that we all fail and will fail. Having the humility to take responsibility for those failures, to learn from them and move past them is important to finding true success.
Ego has been something that I’ve had to kill in my own life. It’s far from an easy process and something that I need to visit over and over again. My previous work environments showed me that overly competitive environments do not make living a humble life easy.
Unhealthy competition in itself is about beating others, which encourages pride and ego. The expectation is perfection and to never show weakness to others. When failure happens, it is something to blame on others or to ignore. The sad thing is where pride and ego dominates, not only does it lead to a toxic environment, it becomes a part of a culture that discourages learning and innovation.
Getting over ourselves requires realizing that helping others is a great way of moving past ego and finding humility. By putting others first, this puts our hearts and minds in the right place. It is hard to have ego when you are showing humility by helping others and finding out what they need. By being willing to meet this need with generosity of our time and talents, not only does it help us to move past moments of failure, but by working with others in their strengths we can move past these things faster together.
Failure can be a Friend
Failure can be a friend if we let it and it can help us to move forward. Failing forward is really about failure being a catalyst for positive change. Instead of letting failure stop us, it can provide some incredible lessons. Failure brings resilience. It’s amazing how the most successful people in life have been ones that have had so many failures. Instead of giving up, they continued to try and eventually met with success.
I really appreciate this quote from Failing Forward:
“To achieve your dreams you must embrace adversity and make failure a regular part of your life.”
Failing Forward is about redefining how we see and measure success. Failing and learning something IS success. We can choose to benefit from these experiences, or we can look at everything through the lens of failure.
With every failure we experience comes more knowledge and understanding that brings us the one step closer to our goal. We can’t give up. Instead of failure being our adversary, we should see it as our friend and teacher. Failure helps us reflect and to learn.
Learning how to embrace failure has been a new skill for me that I exercise daily. Just creating this website has been a lesson in learning how to fail forward. With every good day that I have where I feel inspired and that I’m making a difference, there are other days where I feel like I don’t have the will to carry on. The more I am learning, the closer I’m getting to my goal. I choose not to make excuses. I keep trying even though I know there are so many failures ahead of me. I’m learning to move past so that I can be the person I need to be.
As John Maxwell says, “Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.”
How about you?
I’ve only been able to scratch the surface of this excellent book on failing forward. I would love for you to give it a read and let me know your impressions. Have you had moments where you failed and learned from it? What helps you to move past failure? I’d love to hear your comments on the subject. Please comment below or contact me directly.
