Failure
CATEGORY: REAL WORLD
Why:
When we are more comfortable with failure, we are more willing to take positive risks to grow.
Warm-Up:
Can you describe a time when you failed at something that mattered to you?
Exploration:
Explore the patterns in our stories. What happened after you failed? Which mindsets about failure seemed to help the most? We can all learn to deal better with failure, which in turn gives us the confidence to take positive risks and try new things. Dealing with failure may mean accepting that it is part of any learning process; finding ways to laugh about it; sharing your experience with empathetic friends; or re-framing a failure as a useful experiment. You could imagine a friend told you about a failure, and think of how you would respond to them. Try offering the same supportiveness to yourself. What would you do if you had no fear of failure?
Additional Resources
For a fun extension on this discussion, consider the video below, made by Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX. He has done some amazing things, but also has had some epic failures. He has very big dreams - like to send humans to Mars! - and he knows he’ll have to mess up as he learns how to do that. He made this video to demonstrate all the failures his company had as they were trying to design a huge rocket that could take off, go to space, and safely return. Note that no one was injured in many various crashes and explosions.
What do you notice about his strategy for dealing with failure?