Permission to Fail

Have you ever given yourself permission to fail?  What does that even mean, you might wonder.  I had never really considered this to be an option until I was listening to a podcast discussion between Rich Roll and high performance psychologist Michael Gervais.  Their conversation centred on the mindset and psychology that elite athletes embrace in order to achieve the incredible feats that they do.  And also how these same concepts apply to non-athletes as we strive to achieve goals and work towards successes in different areas of our lives.

The one idea that made me stop in my tracks and take note was a simple question - are we living our lives to avoid failure or to approach success?  Mind. Blown.  

What struck me about this question was the fact that essentially we need to be open to failure in order to move towards success - one doesn't often happen without the other.  Top performing athletes and individuals did not roll out of bed one morning to achieve their greatest goals.  They woke up time and time again, to face hard work, and repetition of drills and other fundamental elements of their game.  They also very likely made a lot of mistakes, missteps and even failed along the way towards their eventual success.  With this in mind, I started to wonder if failure might have a bad rap.  It feels like we have created a narrative around failure that includes shame and embarrassment instead of a celebration of reaching towards a future success.

Think back to the last time you saw a toddler trying to pull themselves up to stand or take their first steps.  What a lesson in determination, grit and failure.  If toddlers internalized the narratives around failure that their parents likely have, they would try to pull themselves up once or attempt to take that first wobbly step and then would decide that sitting is actually WAY more convenient and crawling isn't so bad, and we would have generations of individuals that would never see their way up off of the ground.

So what would happen if we actually gave ourselves permission to fail...to take a wobbly step towards something that means a lot to us, to potentially falter and maybe even fall and then to dust ourselves off and try it again.  We may feel uncomfortable admitting that we have some work yet to do.  We may feel embarrassed at the notion that other people saw us not succeeding.  We may begin to have doubts around whether or not this end result is really worth the effort.  The beautiful thing about these thoughts and emotions?  They are all legitimate and are also only thoughts and emotions, with a short lifespan provided that we open ourselves up to the idea of failure paving the path towards our successes.  If we can embrace the discomfort that comes with venturing outside of our comfort zone we will be rewarded with the knowledge that through this pain comes growth and that the things in life that feel the most meaningful and life altering are the very ones that require us to become humble and permit ourselves to fail.