How Failing Forward Helps You Achieve Your Goals Faster
“Perfection is no longer a possibility when we are learning.
In fact, when we are learning, we must experience our imperfections.”
– Terry Dubroy & Jillian-Rae Picco, The Insightful Journey
Have you ever set a goal on New Year’s Eve that, by January 31st, had completely faded out of view? You were so passionate and excited when you set it in the moment, but then… well, life happened. Unexpected challenges arose. You grew lethargic, lost motivation, and settled for keeping that area of your life the same as it had always been, rationalizing to yourself that it didn’t really matter too much anyways.
If you resonate with these struggles or any other personal ones when it comes to goal achievement, you’re far from alone.
We all know that goals are good. A wealth of science validates the idea that achieving our goals contributes to increased self-esteem, self-confidence, and general life satisfaction. Not only does goal achievement elicit such empowering and motivating feelings, but it also causes us to become more competent, productive, and self-sufficient individuals who have the capacity to give back and improve our communities.
However, it is far easier for some of us than others to set goals that prepare us for success, let alone stay committed to them through challenges.
No matter where you find yourself on the journey to making your dreams a reality, there is a tried and true method that can aid you in becoming consistent in your goal-setting process: ‘Failing Forward’. Educating individuals on this concept through the work that we do here at Thrive: Enabling Potential has empowered so many to transform their relationship to goals, and now it’s your turn to discover how you can, too.
First of all, what is ‘Failing Forward’?
As Terry Dubroy and I write in The Insightful Journey, failing forward is about finding the hidden lesson within every single perceived mistake or failure that you experience. When we say ‘perceived’, we are emphasizing that oftentimes your perceptions are actually tricking you into thinking that you have massively failed, when in fact you have merely made a small mistake that was bound to be part of the learning process to begin with.
We tend to be the hardest on ourselves when engaging in new learning, skills, and experiences that challenge our previous tendencies and push us to change. However, the concept of failing forward teaches us that we do not need to beat ourselves up through the stages we engage in for our development.
If you have become so accustomed to one element of your job that you could almost do it with your eyes closed, for instance, but decide to provoke yourself one day into developing a new skill that enhances your work, chances are you are not going to perfect that skill right away. When I was starting to challenge myself to write nonfiction books when I was used to writing short poems, I often found myself flustered when the visions in my mind did not materialize exactly how I wanted them to when the ink landed on the page. But I began to heal my inner critic by giving myself grace for the fact that I was on the journey of writing at all to begin with. Each time I wrote a crappy first draft, it became a celebration, simply because I had chosen to do something rather than nothing at all.
An individual with a more introverted temperament may recognize that the next step for their business does not involve putting their head down and working hard behind the scenes as they always do, but rather to step out of their comfort zone and network. Such an individual will likely find themselves awkwardly fumbling over their words and feeling the anxious need to rehearse conversation starters before socializing, and they will have two choices when they walk away from their chosen encounter. For one, they could beat themselves up for how awfully they perceive they did. But their other option, which would bring them to the high road of their mind, would be to take a moment of self-appreciation for the greater mountain that they climbed. Rather than hiding away from their fear, they worked through it. The minor social faux paus and awkward fumbling through conversation does not matter, for in the greater scheme, they truly did fail forward – they learned and experienced through action as opposed to watching their lives passively unfold before them from the sidelines.
An individual with a more extroverted temperament may challenge themselves to do the opposite – to turn inward and reflect on how their actions are impacting their lives. They may judge themselves for not being able to sit alone with themselves and engage in meaningful dialogue, but the fact that they carved out the time in their day to create a mindfulness practice is a wonderful example of their path to failing forward.
It often is when we become so fixated on orderly set mental benchmarks that we must accomplish ‘perfectly’, yielding ourselves little to no wiggle room to learn from life’s chaos, that we lose motivation towards taking action consistently. Failing forward requires us to allow the unknown and its corresponding challenges to shape us and aid our growth in ways we once never thought possible. While the way in which circumstances unfold is always out of our hands, choosing to stay open and allow life to be our teacher is our own decision.
While the antidote to goal achievement is failing forward, its adversary is clinging to a fixed mindset.
Contemplate this thought-provoking statement from Terry Dubroy about how a fixed mindset can prevent us from learning through our failures, from the Thriving Perspectives podcast episode “The Thriving Mindset: Navigating Fixed Mindset Beliefs”:
“Someone with a fixed belief is more likely to fear failure, and perhaps even avoid challenges that may present themselves because they’re not open-minded to the fact that learning through the process of making mistakes is where real growth can occur.
I would even say that there’s an element of fixed mindset behavior that sometimes is difficult to detect, because there are people who like to go through life in a very safe way. And so they do the things they already know that they can do. They do things that they can easily achieve rather than putting themselves in front of unknown challenges. They want to do the thing that they're going to knock out of the park every time without any fear of screwing up or failing, as opposed to putting themselves in front of something that is slightly unattainable perhaps and is really going to challenge them and make them grow in new ways.”
Let’s think of a straight-A student who’s terrified to fail. They are so preoccupied with not letting their family and society down that they never actually explore a career option that reflects their inherent talents and curiosities. Instead, they repeat the one job that they have become most comfortable with through their repeated conditioning, and have a crisis later in life where they realize many years were wasted, for they never had adventures that taught them about who they truly were. Instead, they viewed failures as things to be feared and never unleashed anything new about themselves to learn.
Consider that you do not already know who you are, and need to go on an unknown adventure where there will be many mistakes and lessons learned that teach you about who you are to begin with. When you map out your life in your mind, or allow others to project your path for you, you might feel safe and comfortable, but you will never fully realize your potential.
We must learn to view the goals we set as templates and guidelines, leaving much creative room for whatever lessons, crossroads, and side trails the universe plans to plant on our path so that we can truly learn. Ultimately, there is always a much bigger plan at play for our lives that we have no control over. We can never predict exactly what will happen to us next, and while that can sound daunting, it is actually for the positive.
Have you ever heard the phrase “Experience is the greatest teacher”? Consider that this quote is true regardless of whether our experiences lead to ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ outcomes – that everything that happens in our day-to-day lives, regardless of how we feel about it, is present to reflect a lesson that we need to learn.
Journalling Prompts for Failing Forward
In this post, we unearthed how failing forward, being flexible, and finding the gift in the unknown are all vital lifelines for goal achievement. There is so much more that can be said about the ingredients that feed our long-term capacity to stay aligned with our goals, which is why we designed the following thought-provoking reflection questions.
During a quiet moment in your day or week, invite yourself to a reflective moment, and dive into one of the questions that speak to you below.
How can I be more flexible in my goal-setting process?
To what extent is a recent ‘failure’ I experienced just me being hard on myself? How can I have more gratitude for all of my accomplishments?
How can I allow the unknown and life to teach me more often on my path?
What did a recent ‘failure’ teach me – what was its hidden gift?
