If like me, you’re a perfectionist, you’ll have great attention to detail, invest extra time to projects and constantly work towards achieving success. However, in reality, success isn’t usually a smooth ride. Many truly successful business owners for example, will be the first to tell you they’ve tried, and ‘failed’ with numerous other businesses they’ve set up years before achieving success.

Failure Is Key For Success

While this may sound daunting, many successful business owners have the drive to keep going, to pick themselves up and learn from what didn’t quite work before. This determination and hunger to invest in something that makes a difference is often built upon the ‘failings’ from before. Understanding what needs to change and how to move around an obstacle in the road, seems to be one of the key differences between what makes a business sink or flourish.

The Problem With Perfection

A lot of the people we see in our lives, whether celebrities, influencers on social media, or even our colleagues at work, seem to have landed on their feet. It’s easy to see from an outside perspective how successful people are, and automatically assume that they’ve achieved overnight success. But what we don’t tend to see, is the long, gruelling hours they’ve probably invested to reach that point. We don’t always see the trial and errors they’ve had to go through to get something right.

‘Failure’ in Fitness

My relationship with fitness hasn’t always come easy for me. For years, I felt that if I couldn’t commit to a twelve week programme, I must be a failure. I would start off highly motivated, only to have a week off of the plan and feel an overwhelming need to start all over again from the very beginning. I felt I needed to keep proving to myself I could stick to the programme perfectly otherwise the entire effort wouldn’t be good enough.

Surely, twelve weeks was nothing in a long-lifetime. But this internal battle and putting an all-or-nothing approach on myself was perhaps a little harsh on myself in hindsight.

Does it really matter if I didn’t achieve a full twelve weeks? Surely, achieving one workout is more than I had achieved at the start.

Progress is just that. Progression. It’s still moving forward. It’s still one step nearer to achieving my goal of a healthier body and mind. And if I measure this for what it is, it’s still success.

 

Learning To Embrace Mistakes

It has taken me years and a lot of trying, and trying again to accept that there will always be mistakes. And it’s still a way of thinking I am trying to unlearn. This blog will never be perfect and I will never completely perfect every single workout for the rest of my life.

And that’s OK.

Learning to face up to mistakes, imperfections and challenges is how we learn to grow as people. We see areas for improvement, and learn how to approach situations differently. We improve our confidence when we learn a new skill and better our understanding. When we look at the bigger picture, it’s seems more unrealistic to place these enormous pressures on ourselves to be the very best version that we can be.

How To Use ‘Failure’ To Our Advantage

If we can take each of our ‘failings’; every time we face a rejection in a job application, every time we feel deflated we couldn’t do a push-up, and view these as areas of growth towards achieving what we want.

We’ve still gained experience in an uncomfortable area of our lives. We’ve still moved out of our comfort zone, and leaned into developing personal experience doing the things that make us nervous.

Embracing these ‘failings’ is key for success, and something we should all try to remember next time we feel like starting over from the beginning.