This used to be me. Always afraid to put myself out there in case I messed up, in case I didn’t succeed.
Not anymore…It took a long time to grow into the person I am today. Life can teach you many lessons if you are willing to learn and one such lesson I learned along the way is this:
You have to be prepared to fail in order to succeed.
In fact no success comes without some failures. Failure is just another term for learning. We aren’t born successful. We don’t become successful overnight. It takes time. It means making mistakes, learning from them, doing better and doing that over and over again until we get it right.
We have to learn to let go of fear.
Fear of not being good enough, fear of not succeeding, fear of being a disappointment. Fear is the thing that holds us back. Instead we have to learn to look at failure as a learning process. The only real failure would be to not learn anything from what we went through. To stay stuck and to stay in the same place, repeating the same mistakes and going in circles.
How we talk to ourselves is so important.
If we say in our heads “I’m a failure, nothing I do is ever good enough” this mentality will manifest in our actions. How? FEAR. Fear of trying. Fear of failure.
But saying: “I will never know unless I tried.” puts you in a place where you are going to try even if you fail.
When I am about to start something new I say to myself “You’ve never done this before so if you don’t succeed, just remember you didn’t have it to begin with, so technically you don’t loose anything”.
It really is about the way we choose to look at things. Just by changing our mindset around failure and what it actually means, we can learn to see it as an option.
Failure is simply learning.
We can choose to learn from mistakes and do better or we can choose to never try again.
The choice is ours.