Reconsidering “Failure“
In today’s society, we’ve come to fear failure. Not only do we fear it, but we also strive to avoid it, hide from it, and worse of all, beat ourselves up over it. We’ve developed such a negative relationship with it, that it often keeps us from starting something at all.
The idea of failing has woven and intertwined with worthiness. Meaning, if we fail we become unworthy.
I beg to differ.
The famous saying goes, “When one door closes, another one opens.”
Why then, have we become so hung up on the one that’s closing, instead of feeling curiosity and excitement for the one about to open?
Failure Through A New Lens
The truth is, the fear of failure comes from a sense of attachment and control. This obsession with certainty is what breeds the negative connotation of what it means to fail. It also constricts our openness to receive and for things to shape and mold for us in ways we once found unimaginable.
Who's to say that the door that’s about to open, won’t be just as good as, if not better, than the one that closed?
Who’s to say that the door opening is not brilliantly beyond what your imagination thought possible?
What if, then, you started to see your failures as guides to your unimaginable and magnificent opportunities into expansion?
Reframing Your Mindset Around Failure
In reevaluating the relationship with failure, you must evaluate your mindset.
Your mind serves as a safety net for your wellbeing. It allows you to analyze situations so you remain safe. It also serves as an organizer of your wild and inspired ideas. Ideally, when ideas hit, your mind will work with you to make them happen.
However, for many, the mind has taken a new route.
Instead of working with you on birthing your creation, it acts out of fear and convinces you that it’s safer not to embark on this path at all. It tricks you into believing that avoiding failure is better than following the drive.
Once again, I beg to differ.
How Does Failure Impact Your Future?
All sorts of limiting beliefs and unworthiness arise as you receive failure at the moment it’s happening. I’m well aware of the agonizing and dreadful contractions that come from the feelings of failure. Those feelings are so powerful they’re capable of impacting all your future endeavors. It’s up to you, though, in which way you’ll let them impact you.
This is why shifting failure from something that’s happening at the moment, to evaluating it from a future perspective becomes vital in your journey.
Imagine yourself 10, 20, 30, even 50 years from now, what have your failures allowed you to learn? To shape and mold? To discover? In which ways have they brought you back to the right path? In which ways have your past failures set you up to where you’re at now?
This analysis takes the control you so deeply crave at the moment to a wide-open perspective of the reason this could be all happening, in this exact way, at this exact time.
Allow it.