You Never Really Fail

There are no failures in life…only opportunities to learn and grow. 

This doesn’t mean you won’t have times in life where you don’t reach your goal or achieve a desired outcome. There will be plenty of times you come up a little short and you’ll think you’ve failed–we’ve been conditioned to categorize our pursuits as either successes or failures. 

The outcomes falling under society’s definition of “failure” are full of lessons to help us grow for future endeavors–these lessons shift the outcome from a negative, a failure, to a positive, a learning opportunity.

One morning after yoga, one of my yogi friends and I were discussing the benefits of visualization. He shared the impact it had on him as a collegiate wrestler at Iowa but that even visualizing the perfect match didn’t guarantee a win. There would be times his opponent would be stronger and he’d lose the match. 

My response was that I was sure despite the L on his record he learned something in the match that helped him win a match later in his career. Maybe the loss was necessary to help him win more important matches later and without that loss he may have suffered more L’s on his record later in the season.

His loss was not a failure.

The outcome may not have ended in the column he and his coaches had hoped it would, but it was not a failure because he grew as a wrestler and learned a lesson (or even lessons) that helped him in the future.

This learning and opportunity for growth extends beyond the wrestling mat and applies to all of us.

If you find yourself in a situation where you don’t reach your goal or end up with an L on your record take some time to review what happened and look for what you could have done different, what assumptions did you make that weren’t correct, did you give it your all, and any other lesson you can find that will help you in your next attempt.

ONE WAY TO FAIL

As I think about it, there is one way to fail…failing to learn from the experience of not achieving your desired result…or more simply put, failing to learn from failure.

See you tomorrow and keep pursuing,

JC