Last week I wrote all about failure and about how we give ourselves a really hard time as mums specifically around failure and how we’re so good at focusing in on failure.
This week I was keen to cover why failure can actually be a good thing. It’s a really helpful thing to happen to us. And certainly when I look at my own life and I look at each time I have ‘failed’, I have genuinely grown in lots of different ways. That failure has often put me in a completely different direction. A classic example is my second birth actually catapulted me into a career as a doula because I felt so incensed with what happened to me. When I got PND, it’s shown me how strong and how resilient I am. And with that, that also changed my career path. The passion I have for the work I do has come from failure not ‘success’.
Fear of failure can be one of the things that can continuously hold us back. And that can become a block for creating growth and creating change. There’s lots of things we can take from failure:
- Strength – identifying how strong you are as you have got through that situation
- Resilience – that you are still persevering
- What have I learned from that experience? What can I do differently? That is specifically good for things like birth, breastfeeding and motherhood. What would I do to make it better, to feel better about it?
- Identify what went right in that whole process – we are very good as humans to focusing in on all the things that went wrong and never identify what went right and be really proud about it – absolutely relevant for birth/feeding/motherhood. Maybe it’s the people you’ve met? The lessons you’ve learned about yourself?
We are so often held back by fear of failure, fear of not being good enough, fear of not achieving certain goals. We can reframe that being about choice – it’s all about learning from choice rather than letting that procrastination hold us back leading to indecision, continuous internal dialogue, sleep disturbances and all consuming dialogue.
When we start to re-frame failure as learning from our choices or experiences that have happened to us we can start to feel differently about ‘failure’ rather than letting the fear of failure hold us back. It means we can put our hearts, minds and souls into decisions. And once we’ve made those decisions to being open to that choice or that decision being all about our life path of learning rather than putting too much pressure on ourselves. And if it doesn’t go perfectly that we can make it better next time.
It’s moving mindset from a fixed to a growth shifting our mindset around failure and seeing that failure isn’t a bad thing. Being perfect isn’t always necessary and definitely not achievable. I have huge concerns about those who seem to have it all together all the time. Sometimes we need to just go with our gut instinct and make that choice and move forward. Even if that choice in that decision isn’t always the right one that we will learn very quickly from whatever the outcome is. And often those gut decisions are often the right decisions. We know that our guts are like second brains and are so pivotal in terms of helping us to make the right decisions.
Fear, failure, indecision, procrastination and so much more are key things we work with in Overcome the Overload. I am DELIGHTED that membership is re-opening on the 26th to the 30th September. If you would like to go on the waitlist for one of the 25 places, then click here.
Much love, Tricia xxxx
