Giving Yourself Permission To Fail

A lot of times, you hold yourself back from going after your goals and dreams in life.  Maybe it’s fear, worry, or simply self doubt that stops you in your tracks.  Whatever it may be, it’s preventing you from living life to your full potential.  You need to give yourself permission to fail.  That’s the only way you’ll grow and fully experience life.  It’s not about all the things you got right.  It’s about the journey and the experience along the way.  Achieving your goal requires a lot of failure before you finally reach success.  It’s time to learn how to embrace failure and give yourself permission to fail in life.  Success is ultimately achieved through failure.

Trying New Things

Your mind is like a trap.  Its job is to keep you safe within your comfort zone of what’s familiar.  Anything outside of that is scary and unknown.  Yet, that’s where life truly begins.  It’s taking those baby steps outside your comfort zone and pushing the limits ever so slightly that allows you to expand what you’re comfortable with.  Sure, it’s frightening at first, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes second nature and it might even be fun!  Just like learning anything new, you’re a novice at first before you become the expert.  You fail many times before you get really good at something.  This doesn’t mean you should be afraid to try something new.  In fact, this is the beginning of how to expand your comfort zone by experiencing tiny failures as you learn new things.

Learning Lessons

Often times, you’re afraid to fail because of how you may look to others.  Perhaps incompetent, incapable, stupid, etc.  It’s like when you stood there waiting to get picked by the team leader to play sports in school.  You didn’t want to look like the weakest one and be the last one picked.  How embarrassing!  However, your worth is not determined by if you win or lose.  That’s hard to understand when you’re taught from a young age that winning and getting good grades is all that matters.  Failure is rarely celebrated growing up.  Yet, there are a lot of things you can learn about yourself and what you can improve on next time when you fail.  But, usually you’re so caught up in beating yourself up over failing that you don’t see the lessons you can learn.  As an adult, you have the ability to change the way you experience failure and what it means as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Permission To Fail

Most importantly, you must give yourself permission to fail.  Stop trying to make everything perfect because it never will be.  Perfectionists can’t fully experience life because nothing will ever be perfect.  Perfect is subjective.  Your perfect is different than my perfect.  It’s more like a paper for an English class.  Sure, you can achieve a perfect grade on a math test, but life is more along the lines of creative writing.  You get to decide what your life’s memoir entails.  A good memoir has ups and downs.  That means failure and success.  You can’t expect anything otherwise with life.

To fully experience life, you need to acknowledge that failure is going to happen.  Don’t try to avoid it.  Embrace it and push yourself to put yourself in situations where you will fail because you’ll learn a lot.  Failure does not make you less than or unworthy.  Avoid perfectionism and make it messy.  Just like an abstract painting, your mess and failures can turn out beautiful.  Live your life and don’t be afraid of failure because each of your past failures is what has gotten you to this point.  There is so much more to come.  Do not be afraid of failure.  There is no reason to fear failure because on the other side of failure is success, growth, and whole bunch of lessons learned.  Go after your goals and dreams in life knowing that with each success comes a lot of failures along the way.