Fail lately? I have and it hurts.
As I worked through some issues recently, I started to question why I felt as badly as I did. In the end, I’ve started to come to terms with expectations and pressure. Most of my disappointment was coming from a sense of shame. It’s not a very productive feeling and reminds you of what can happen if you let your self-worth be based on another person’s (or group’s) evaluation of what you have done for them.
The trouble is that assigning a sense of shame for a perceived failure puts a limit on its real learning potential. It cues defensiveness, blame shifting, and ultimately wastes precious time. If something goes wrong at home, sometimes we look around at our closet relatives and ask “who’s to blame?” If there is something wrong in the football game the crowd demands to boo the guilty player. It is pretty common to see failure which such shame-filled lenses. Practice opportunities surround us everywhere.
Failing is part of growth, and if you quit failing, then you are playing it safe. Pushing yourself does not have failure as a risk, in a unique way, failure is the reward. Unlike many practical, daily experiences, pushing yourself physically is done properly all around the brink of failure. Here and perhaps, outside of fitness, failure can be a friend.
Imagine for a second, if we assigned the same kind of shame to a one rep maximum that you fail to clear completely? No effective trainer/workout buddy is going to turn you in a scape goat from meeting your limit. Instead, they would note what was reached and as you step away from the bar, they would start to prepare for a (successful) future attempt.
Using the workout analogy, failure is an education and it can be a welcome friend. It teaches us about our current ability and it offers us the most powerful choice one can have. We can choose to meet our limit, shake its hand with a grin, and promise to return better prepared to push right through your current limitation.
Growing, whether professionally or personally, requires constant stretching. Those stretches are most effective near the point of failure. Failure and shame have it backwards, because meeting a new natural limit is the sign of human strength while playing safe and never pushing forward is the only thing that makes one weak.
Growth requires occasional failing and because of that failing shouldn’t be met with shame. When you fail, accept your current limit with a commitment to work through it next time and fail-proud.
