On embracing failure
Lulu Townsend reveals how making mistakes can lead to our greatest lessons
Failure has the power to transform us, push our boundaries and lead us to success and new beginnings. It often presents itself as uncharted territory, a path less travelled, and can manifest in various forms – a business venture that didn't take off, one that started and then failed, a relationship that didn't work out, or a personal goal that remained unachieved.
Rather than just a dead end, failure is a valuable teacher in disguise and provides us with invaluable lessons. It teaches us humility, resilience, and the importance of perseverance. Through failure, we gain a deeper understanding of our strengths and weaknesses, allowing us to make better decisions and navigate future challenges with wisdom.
In the realm of business and finance, failure is often seen as a stepping stone to success. Many successful entrepreneurs and innovators have experienced multiple failures before achieving greatness. Failure fuels innovation by pushing us to think outside the box, encouraging us to take risks and explore new possibilities. It’s through failure that we learn to adapt, pivot, and ultimately create something extraordinary.
Amy Edmondson, the world’s leading expert on psychological safety, draws on a lifetime's research into the science of 'psychological safety' in her book, Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive to show that the most successful cultures are those in which you can fail openly, without your mistakes being held against you.
She says: ‘If you’re not failing, you’re not journeying into new territory’. And she adds: ‘It’s impossible to count the wasted time and resources created by our failure to learn from failure.’
Failure helps us to grow as people. It challenges us to confront our fears and step into the unknown. Failure forces us to re-evaluate our goals, priorities and values. It encourages us to reflect on our choices and make necessary adjustments. By embracing failure and sitting with the feeling rather than pushing it away, we embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery, self-love and self-improvement.
A retreat can help us work through failure, by allowing us to sit with our feelings, explore our thoughts and face who we really are. Through tailored wellbeing activities we can work through our issues and learn about ourselves and why things didn’t work out the way we thought they should.
It's natural to put off the hard work of reflecting where we went wrong; it’s scary to dig deep and meet yourself, as you may not like who you see, but part of the journey is to learn to accept the mistakes you have made, what went wrong, and to learn to love who you are and be grateful.
To truly appreciate the benefits of failure, we must shift our mindset. As former Prime Minister Winston Churchill said: ‘Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.’
Instead of viewing failure as a setback, we should see it as a new path towards success and a new chapter.
