“There’s no such thing as failure only feedback”
This is a presupposition from NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming, and I remember not understanding it the first time.
I had failed at many things.
Failing felt awful.
Failing felt like I had let myself and others down by not being good enough.
I didn’t realise until sometime afterwards, just how much I had learned from what seemed at the time to be failures.
In our successful attempts at anything, we learn what works and this can lead to confirmation bias – we only do what we know – which is the same as a fixed mindset.
In our unsuccessful attempts, we learn what didn’t work and so we have a choice to either stop and give up OR get curious about what could’ve worked instead, and so have to explore, experiment and learn.
What did you learn from your failures?
I learned:
- To say no more often so I don’t let people down by too many yes’s.
- To be more present where I am so people feel heard and seen.
- To shine a light on the other person I’m with rather than try to highlight everything I thought was great about me
- That #kindnessworks more than ego
- To pay attention to the words we use more carefully
- That we all have a “wounded self” and we don’t always need a solution, just compassion and a listener