Get Comfortable with Failing
Apr 10, 2021
Earlier this week, I posed a question to my online community: is there a difference between FAILING and NOT SUCCEEDING?
My answer is 100% yes there is a difference.
Failing is not trying. Failing is not starting. Failing sometimes includes quitting when things get tough or uncomfortable.
Even though it might look more like success than failure, failing may also show up as taking only small, insignificant chances, or setting reachable goals so that it's guaranteed that you'll be successful.
Think about this example. Say you've set a stretch goal to earn $500,000 in sales commissions this year. You've never earned more than $300,000 in any given year, but you're feeling bullish about the market and have some good prospects in your pipeline.
At the end of a great sales year, the commissions are tallied and you earned $450,000.
Did you succeed? No. You didn't achieve your sales goal of earning $500,000.
But did you fail? Would you consider yourself a failure because you only earned $450,000, which is 30% more than you've ever earned before? You shouldn't!
And think about everything you've gained over the course of the year while you were trying to reach that stretch goal: the processes you put in place, the skills you learned, the relationships you made that will continue to pay off over time.
In that example, you might not have succeeded, but you certainly didn't fail.
So many of us were taught that failure was a bad thing. We've spent much of our life chasing the promotions, the Straight A's and the gold stars. We've set small goals just to say that achieved them and could put a checkmark in a box. We've liked basking in external approval and the recognition we received for succeeding.
But for many of us, it's high-time that we reframe our relationship with failure.
For many of us, we need to rethink how we define failure and success. It's possible to be succeeding, but not growing or learning. You can be a success by playing small and staying comfortable.
One of my favorite motivational quotes is "a comfort zone is a beautiful place to be, but nothing ever grows there."
It might be time to challenge yourself to move out of your comfort zone.
It might be time to reframe your relationship with failing, and get comfortable with it. Failing means you're trying. You're growing. You're pushing yourself. You're opening yourself up to more, bigger, better.
Failure is not an ending, unless you choose it to be.
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