75Hard Week #5: Failure vs. Falling
75Hard Week #5: Failure vs. Falling By: Erin Suarez
Ahhh, a new week, and a new found perspective to get started with a fresh mindset.
We talked last week about the idea of self-love and how it relates to accomplishing your sought after goals. About not confusing the idea of “self-love” with justification for giving up, or giving in, when your feelings and emotions waiver (and if you didn’t read it, you totally should). Expanding on that idea, I want to take this convo a bit deeper and talk about another topic that is often justified... failure.
Somewhere along the way, someone filled our minds with words of “justification” that it is ok to fail. Now, I’d like to think that most of us do not like the feelings of failure. I think back to my biggest failures in life and the emotions that I associate with those life events - disappointment, embarrassment, regret - just to name a few.
If you were able to reflect on your own times of failure in your life, let me ask you, how often do you let those past failures dictate your future failures?
Because the 75Hard program focuses on strong mental-athleticism, I think this is a topic worth really looking deep inside.
As human beings, we will have times in life where we just flat out don’t get things right. We mess up. Things don’t go as planned. But does that mean we have failed? Or have we just fallen?
Whether you’re a parent, or not, we have all seen the resiliency of a child learning to walk. They fall and they get right back up again, headed towards whatever it is in their sight. Sometimes though, they fall and they get hurt (either physically or emotionally) and they throw their head back, cry and reach for someone to pick them up and comfort them.
Does a small child give up on walking because they fell, or got hurt? I’m pretty certain that they’re not rationalizing to themselves “well kid, you failed at walking yesterday, you’ll never amount to anything, walking just isn’t for you.”
Hopefully that at least made you smile, but at what point in life did we start holding such limiting beliefs about ourselves? Stop allowing limits to be placed on your successes, and even more importantly, stop being the one who places those limits.
The next time you FALL, practice that self-love, get up and dust yourself off (before anyone is looking). Failure is no longer an option. You may fall along the way, but you are strong in mind, body and spirit - you know what to do.
Are you still working towards your 75 Hard goal, one step and one day at a time? If you have fallen along the way, here’s your friendly accountability partner reminding you that failure is not an option.
