Tuesday 4 February 2014

The Value of Making Failure Your Friend

In a world where perfection is an ideal that most aspire to, failure is seen as an enemy and as something that opposes success and happiness with a whole bunch of shame attached to it. The culture of the day is that failure is to be avoided at all costs. Somehow over the years failure has come to be seen as a happening or event that limits, depletes and devalues a person's worth.

Milton Erickson wrote that, "Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy". This got me thinking about how failure brings with it a responsibility. The privilege of failing allows for the greatest growth, if we choose to learn and grow. Every negative experience in your life such as financial stress and relationship failure all become the vehicle by which learning can occur. If you see failure as a teacher and embrace the lesson within each experience you will shift to a new place, a different place and bigger place - you will be enlarged and your potential will be unlocked. When failure is seen as an enemy, holding patterns of frustration, anger and fear emerges that shrinks and diminishes the world of those who will not embrace it.

Embracing the things and events in your life that has caused you the deepest pain and the highest stress as noble teachers and fine friends is the first step to "creating joy". I have grown stronger and become wiser from my deepest failures. In those moments of my life I have learned most about myself. I have become more authentic, more at peace and more creative. By embracing failure I have allowed it to process me in a way success never will. In this way failure has come to work for me and while I dislike the discomfort that accompanies its presence in my life I know by embracing it as a friend I am setup to ascend, to shift and be become my true self. So failure becomes a clue of what we must get through in order to become who we were meant to be - our best and original selves :)

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