I know no one ever likes to fail because you may be seen as not successful or not smart. This is so far from the truth. I was part of a project this week that had a failed process and it was a real eye opener for me.

I can sometimes be a perfectionist especially in my work environment. I want things to always go as planned and be successful. When that doesn’t happen, it makes me anxious and upset with myself. I don’t like this feeling.

For the most part, the project I was involved in was successful, but it did have one process that didn’t go as planned. Some called it a failure. I became upset with myself because I don’t want to be associated with failure. But then I took a look at the situation and I thought we didn’t fail because we learned a valuable lesson.

I have heard of so many successful people who have failed when they first started out. Do you know that Thomas Edison was told by his teachers that he was too stupid to learn anything? Albert Einstein didn’t start speaking until he was four. Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first job as a TV anchor. Stephen King’s novel, Carrie, was rejected 30 times!

I can go on and on about people who are now successful and the number of times that they failed. We have all failed at some point in our lives. But, “failure isn’t fatal”!

Here are some tips on how you can fail forward to success:

1. Admit mistakes - Have you ever failed at something and then not be able to admit that you are wrong or to blame? This is a mistake. If you know that you have failed or were wrong, you should admit to it and then learn the lesson. There is no point in deflecting blame as that will only make you look bad. Accepting your mistakes will allow you to move forward to fix it.

2. Learn the lesson - I love doing a post mortem on an initiative that didn’t go as planned. What went wrong? What could you have been done better to make this a success? These lessons will only help you for the next project.

3. Get back up! Don’t let failure keep you down. You need to get right back to doing what you do. Failure is not a life sentence. You can look at failure as an opportunity to do something else or something better.

4. Take risks again - whenever you take risks it can lead to failure - that’s what it means by taking risks. Even if you fail, continue to take risks because it can turn into success. As long as you believe in what you are doing and you are making a plan with controls in place to mitigate the risks, your plan can be successful.

An example of how failure works in practice is like being the scientists and medical experts who are working on creating a new vaccine for COVID. They will need to do many tests before the vaccine will be successful. It will most likely not be a success for some time to come (I hope I am wrong!). They will most likely fail at first but each time they fail, they will learn a lesson that will make them successful in the future.

This concept of failing should be taught more often in schools and organizations. While we always want to be successful, failure is often the first step in getting there.

The next time you fail look at it as an opportunity. These are learning opportunities that can help push you forward to success.

Here’s to your success!

Best,

Rene