Glorious Failure
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
"I intentionally make at least three mistakes a day!" said Dr Michael Hall at a training session I attended.
"Did he really just say that?" I wondered to myself.
"Yes, I try to make mistakes on purpose! Because if I'm not failing, I believe that I'm not learning" Dr Hall continued. That was the first time he introduced me to the concept of being gloriously fallible.
I had heard of learning from our mistakes, and that seemed like the strategy to use to lessen the pain of the error, and hopefully not repeat it. However, developing the intentional state of being gloriously fallible was new to me. How could making a mistake be wonderful and something to celebrate? And even be set as an intention?
Somehow some of us have grown up with the feeling that failing at something is a big negative- it's something that we feel bad about. It's something that we try so hard to avoid- often to the extent that it prevents us from trying something a little different or even new.
Yet failing at something is ultimately just information: as the presupposition in NLP says "There is no such thing as failure- only feedback". And feedback, or information that comes back at us in response to some action we've taken (or not taken even), is the food of champions.
Feedback is how we know we are getting closer to our goal, or further away from it. It is how we know that we need to do something differently, or that we've got it right and need to keep doing what we're doing. Without this kind of information, how would we know that we are going in the direction we want to go- or even just experiencing something!
If we look at the concept of "failure", are we not just looking at an outcome that did not match an expectation? Or worded another way, failure just means that we didn't get the result we wanted. Conversely, then, success is when we get the result we wanted or our expectations are met. Feedback is the mechanism through which we receive the information through our senses, which we then perceive as telling us if we've got the result we were aiming for or not - which we can then label as "failure" or "success".
The exciting part about the information that we label as "failure" is that it gives us clues as to what we need to do differently so that we can then experience the feedback of success. Once we know the structure of that success, we can then repeat it as often as we like.
In reading Marc Allen's book "The Millionaire Course", he has identified being able to celebrate failures as one of the keys to becoming a Millionaire. He describes making mistakes as "the great teaching tools- they can teach us what not to do, and that's invaluable". He also quotes his friend, a director and playwright called John Clarke Donahue as saying:
We should celebrate glorious failure! Why be afraid of failure? Why not celebrate it? When we allow ourselves to fail - in small ways and in glorious huge flops - we're guided to great things by our creative spirit.
I have yet to find a person who is not open to learning and growing in some aspect of their lives. So I have yet to find a person who has not experienced feedback that they have labeled as failure. The most useful part of what Dr Hall, Marc Allen and John Clarke Donahue are saying is that when we celebrate and embrace what we label as feedback, we not only learn faster and get to where we want to go quicker, we also enjoy the ride more!
To you failing at least 3 times a day!
Telana
Labels: celebrate, failure, falliblity, fear, feedback, John Clarke Donahue, Marc Allen, Michael Hall, Millionaire, NLP, presupposition, success
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posted by Telana @ 5:12 am,
1 Comments:
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At 2/3/08 1:17 pm,
Telana said...
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2 hour Power Session on the "Falibility" now available. Click
here for more information.
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Telana Simpson
Telana Simpson is a Professional Personal and Communication Coach. She is a caring and focused facilitator who has a passion for expression. She helps executives, individuals and entrepreneurs find authentic ways of communicating their inner potentials.
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