How To Learn from Our Failures in Life
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
How to learn from our failures in life is a topic we rarely think, speak, or debate about. Failure is not pretty or popular.
Especially in a world that loves, adores, and celebrates success. Successful people. Successful ideas. Successful teams.
We’re constantly bombarded with quick-fix tips on how to achieve success whether we want to lose weight, write a book, overcome our grief, or get rid of our limiting beliefs.
What about failure?
Why doesn’t anyone teach us how to fail gracefully? Fail positively? Fail better?
We all fail at things.
We all make mistakes, big and small.
We all struggle at not succeeding.
In Human Design, there’s an aspect of our design called Profile. It’s a combination of two numbers like 6/2, 1/3. 5/1, or 3/5. Our profile is the costume we’ve chosen to wear in this lifetime to achieve our purpose, sort of like the role we chose to play on the stage of life.
For instance, my profile is 6/2. The 6 is the wise guide who teaches from lived experience, is committed to living an authentic life, and being a role model (if you’ve been in my space long enough, you know this is what I try to do).
No matter your profile, we’re all going to fail at things because that’s how we learn as humans. But if you have a 3 in your profile, failing and learning lessons through it is part of your purpose.
The 3 is the Experimenter or Scientist energy according to Human Design. Anyone who experiments must be willing to fail and fail and fail again before they succeed.
Failure is rich soil for beautiful things to grow. But we need to understand failure and work with it to help that growth.
I’ve failed at plenty of things in my life. I wish someone had held my hand and told me that failing at things didn’t mean I was a failure.
But because our parents, schools, and society never taught us about failing, many of us move through life carrying the heavy burden of past failures, never making friends with failure, and condemning ourselves to a life of I’ll never be good enough.
It’s time to stop this. The world needs us all to step up and serve. But we’ll never get there if we continue to define ourselves by what we didn’t get done. what didn’t go right, and what we’ll never be able to do.
Failing on the way to getting it right is the path of a human.
If we don’t learn to make peace with past failures, open ourselves to trying and failing again, we’ll never step out of our comfort zones.
I taught a masterclass on how to learn from our failures.
You can buy that class at the link below: