Celebrating Failures

Celebrating wins is fun. Acknowledging something you did well or something you accomplished. It is wonderful to celebrate big and small wins throughout the day. It gives you the little splash of satisfaction which acts as an energy booster to go through your day.

How about failures? What do you feel about them? Do you celebrate them?

What is a failure anyway? Failure is not meeting your goal or expectation.

When you do not achieve the standard you set, how do you feel? It is natural to feel sad, frustrated or disappointed. When you set a goal to do a task, you do not set out expecting to fail.

Why is it important to celebrate your failures?

Failure is part of life. If you are always succeeding, that means you do not have a high enough goal to challenge yourself. That also means that you are not growing. This is a failure in itself – a failure to grow.

Failure is to let us feel the discomfort of not achieving your goal. There is also the fear of failure – behind this fear, there is fear of being judged by other people.

The more you fail, the more comfortable you get in failing. The more you fail, the closer you are to your goal. As long as you keep your goal in mind, your actions will be gearing toward achieving that particular goal. If the method you tried did not work, you can try a different approach.

Celebrate failure because you are one step closer to achieving your goal. Failure is a great teacher. It is important to view failure as not reaching your standard or goal, and it does not mean you are a failure as a person. What did not work is a great reference for you to learn from, so you do not make the same mistake twice. When something did not work as planned, you get to be curious to explore what other possibilities to make it work.

The time that you are failing as a person is when you do not pick yourself up from a failure, when you beat yourself up, hide, avoid feeling the emotions, and not take action.

Celebrate your failures because the more you fail, the faster you will succeed. Normalize failing, it is part of life. We are imperfectly human and that is okay. No one is perfect. We learn and grow.

There are many different emotions associated with a particular failure; allow them and embrace them. Have the awareness of why you feel a certain way.

Accept your failure. This does not mean you like it. You are simply acknowledging it.

Besides celebrating your failures, it is important to pick yourself up. Keep trying different things. Keep learning. Keep growing. Keep taking action and using a different approach.

It is important to celebrate both wins and failures. Celebrating failures remind you to focus on your goal, on your why. Failure stretches you in discomfort and helps you to grow, both in experience and in character. Failure allows you to learn to accept it as part of life. Allow yourself to feel your emotions associated with failure. Then let yourself be curious and open-minded to figure out what else you can do to achieve your goal.  Keep trying. Keep taking action. Celebrate along the way. You are that much closer to success.