Joanita Male
I can’t pinpoint when, where or how, but somewhere in my childhood, I took on the notion that failure wasn’t an option, especially when it came to things like academics. Whether I had made the right amount of effort or not, when I failed at something, I truly beat myself up. Instead of looking for the lesson in failure, I chose self-punishment.
In a strange way, this notion served me. Because I knew the self-punishment that would follow, I stayed as far away from failure as I could. I walked the straight and narrow, took few risks and worked hard to get things right.
And then I grew up. I took on leadership. And isn’t it funny how leadership requires almost the opposite? You have to make decisions without always knowing how they will turn out. You have to take chances, try things that may not work and become comfortable with the possibility that not everything will go according to plan.
Perhaps that has been one of the more uncomfortable lessons of adulthood for me: redefining failure. Not every risk will pay off. Not every idea will work as intended. And not every goal will be reached exactly when or how we imagined. That doesn’t diminish the value of trying.
You learn. You adjust. You make a different decision the next time. Perhaps growing up is realising that success was never about avoiding failure altogether. It was about developing the confidence to try, the humility to learn and the resilience to keep moving.
Leadership stretches you in ways achievement alone never can. It asks you to trade the comfort of always getting things right for the responsibility of making decisions, taking considered risks and continuing to learn.
Maybe failure was always an option.
Maybe the real failure would have been learning nothing from it.
Image Credit: Nuthawut – stock.adobe.com
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