There's no such thing as failure - only feedback

In this week's blog, I'd like you to toy with the idea that there's no such thing as failure, only feedback. What could you do if you applied this to your life? What could you potentially achieve? How could you embrace uncertainty even more so? What would happen if you knew that you could not fail, but simply receive feedback as to how not to do something? How different would your life be if you could get back up and give something another go?

Many of the greats out there - Thomas Eddison especially, lived by this philosophy. Imagine if Eddison gave up on his idea of creating the lightbulb after his first attempt because it was not successful? No, he was a man of tenacity and realised that each time he "failed"it was simply feedback that this wasn't the way to do something. He would tweak his design and have another go. He did this approximately 999 times. Talk about receiving awesome feedback.

I'm not sure about you, but failure used to be one of my biggest fears. I didn't want to appear as though I didn't know what I was doing or that I wasn't perfect. When I was taught this principle, it put a whole new spin on things for me. Í've begun to embrace a level of uncertainty that hasn't existed in my life before and am now excited knowing that whatever I do, I can't actually fail at it, because what is failure anyway?

According to the dictionary, it's the condition of not achieving the desired end or ends. Hmm .... interesting. When we attempt to do something, how do we know how it will turn out any way? We don't. We only ever have an expectation or a pre-conceived idea of what's meant to happen. So, based on that as evidence, this whole "failure"thing doesn't really have a leg to stand on.

Most of the time we're scared to try new things without any evidence that we will fail, it's just a story we've told ourselves. We hold ourselves back saying "I could never do that", "Oh, I wouldn't be any good at that", based on little to no evidence.

This week I encourage you to attempt at least one thing that you've been afraid of failing at, and embrace it head on with your new-found belief that there's no such thing as failure..... only feedback. I'd love to hear from you how this experiment goes.