Reframe failure for ultimate success
Resources and links mentioned:
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-croner
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Check out the video transcript:
Do you cringe at the thought of failing? Well, stay tuned. I'm about to share with you some surprising benefits of failure, as well as a simple hack that helped me fail more and fail forward.
Assistants, if you would like more self-care and productivity strategies geared towards you, please subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to be notified when my weekly videos go live. I'm Annie Croner of wholeassistant.com. On this season of The Whole Assistant Show, we've been exploring simple mindset shifts that can have a huge impact when it comes to overcoming our limitations. In today's episode, I'm going to be sharing some fantastic benefits of failure, as well as my simple approach to failing that has actually made failure more fun and more productive for me.
Now, the idea of actively and purposely putting ourselves out there and repeatedly failing may be a stretch for some of us. A lot of us, especially as assistants, we tend to lean more towards perfectionism and fear of failure, but I would invite you to open up your mind a little bit here because there are some amazing benefits to failing.
The first benefit of failing is that failure builds resilience. As you fail more, your recovery time will be less and less and you will get less and less down on yourself. You will just build this resilience, which is awesome. This can create more creative solutions in our personal lives and in our work lives because if we're willing to fail, we're likely willing to try new things and try new, innovative ways of approaching situations and issues and problems. Resilience is a great benefit and one that I have experienced numerous times as a result of actively putting myself in situations where I will likely fail.
The second benefit of failure is that through failure, we learn lessons and we can grow exponentially faster than we ever would playing it safe. I know this has definitely been true for me. What I love about this is that I'll either succeed or I'll walk away with something that can benefit me long-term. I'll walk away with lessons and takeaways from that failure that will serve me.
Last but not least, failure keeps us humble and compassionate. Failing is just proof that we don't have all the answers yet and that we are being humble enough to actually give it a shot and to fail. That's a great thing. It also serves to grow our compassion for others, because if we know that we get it wrong sometimes, then we're going to be much more likely to take it easy on others when they get it wrong too.
Can you think of some other benefits of failing? If so, I want to hear about them. Please leave a comment in the comment section below.
The question then becomes, how do we put ourselves in more situations where we may fail? Now, I'm going to clarify something for you guys. When I talk about actively failing, what I'm not talking about is a passive failure. We can fail all day long by doing absolutely nothing and sitting on our butts and watching Netflix, that is not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about here is making a concerted to do something correctly and failing anyway.
Failure is like a muscle, just like any other muscle, and the more you practice it, the easier it becomes and the more you're able to lift and the more resilient you become as a result of that failure. Basically, you just need to put yourself in situations where you may fail. You need to take on that project that scares you. You need to try that new activity or pastime that you've been holding off on because you didn't want to look stupid. These are great ways to embrace failure and to get the amazing benefits of failure.
Now, another tip I have for you guys, that has actually proven very beneficial for me and it's my favorite hack when it comes to failing, is to set a goal for failure and to keep track of your failures. I heard about this a while back and I started doing it. It's really profound because even when I fail, I made another part of my goal happen. Say I want to fail 10 times this month and I try something really with a concerted effort and I fail, well, that's okay because I now have checked off one of the failures for the month on my list. I actually keep a Google Doc of all my failures, believe it or not. It's really, really helpful because even though I failed, there's still some joy there because I got to check one off of my list for the month.
I hope this episode has helped you reframe failure. Please let me know in the comment section if you intend to fail more. If you're interested in avoiding burnout and developing better self-care strategies, please check out my free mini masterclass, Three Steps to Beautifully Banish Burnout. The link is below. To continue this discussion and receive support from your fellow assistants and administrative professionals, please hop on over to facebook.com/groups/wholeassistant to join our assistants-only community.
If you liked this episode, please let me know by hitting the like button below. Also, be sure to subscribe and share this video with your fellow assistants and administrative professionals. Last but not least, if this video has helped you in any way, I want to know about it, so please leave a comment below sharing how.
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