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When you hear the word FAIL, what does your body feel? If you’ve never stopped to ask that question, do it now. “What does it feel like to FAIL“?
Where do you feel it? What does it feel like? Is there tightness or heaviness? If yes, ask yourself if you might be resisting the idea of failure. When you think of failure, does anything specific come to mind? Maybe there is a recent event or something in your past that you’re still replaying in your head. Keep that story in mind for a moment.
Below are three definitions that come up when you search the word FAIL:
- be unsuccessful in achieving one’s goal:
- neglect to do something:
- break down; cease to work well:
It’s no wonder we want to avoid failure. But what if we tossed those definitions aside and learned a new understanding of the word.
What if you knew FAIL to mean:
F – Faithful
A – Attempt
I – In
L – Learning
Think about that…to fail means to have a Faithful Attempt in Learning.
Go back to that failure story you thought of earlier. What does it look like now if you think about that event in your life with the new understanding of the word FAIL? Rather than focusing on everything you did wrong, what can you learn from your attempt? Does this feel any different in your body?
If we strive for perfection, we end up with dissatisfaction. If we strive for learning, we end up growing. We drop the judgments, the expectations and the fear and begin to open up to new possibilities.
I challenge you to embrace this new definition and see how life shifts for you.
It’s not the number of attempts that matters, it’s the fact that you’re learning something with each one. So keep attempting!
Light Watkins