Flipping the Script on Failure
If you don’t give yourself permission to fail, you’ll never put in the work needed to improve.
We’ve all experienced failure. I CRINGE just thinking about the many fails I've had in my life.
For me personally, experiencing the deep cut of failure (yes, it’s dramatic!! lol) as an artist has been especially painful. Oh my gosh, does it hurt! Pouring my heart and soul into a painting, a project, or a new idea that is uniquely mine, sharing these efforts publicly (because that is the nature of my business) and sometimes these efforts are met with criticism, unsubscribes, and/or zero interest. OUCH.
It feels SO personal at the time and, in the aftermath, I tend to spiral. No need to go into the gritty details, we’ve all been there.
My immediate instinct is to back down from the failed new idea and go back to playing it safe out of fear. I just caught myself doing this recently and you know what? I’m not going to allow myself to retreat and climb back into my box.
So how about this instead —
Moving forward, let’s flip the script. Let’s give ourselves permission to fail because that is what is needed to improve. Let’s use failures to learn and be smarter with how we take risks and explore new things.
In my old life, I worked in a sales department. We had a rule of thumb - for every 9 NOs, you will get one YES. We used to reward those NOs - it really helped our mental game. Rather than get bummed that people kept rejecting you and telling you NO, we would get excited because we understood it was part of the process, completely normal and what was needed to get that yes.
So, what if we reward our failures — each time we fail, we pat ourselves on the back for sticking our necks out, trying something new, and learning from our mistakes? If you think about it this way, then each failure brings you one step closer to reaching your goals.
We all have a vision of who we want to be and what we want to achieve. That looks different for all of us. For me, my vision for my art practice is not concrete. Rather, it’s a journey in which I’m constantly exploring and learning. To accomplish this, I am giving myself permission to fail and make bad art so that I can put in the work needed to get to where I want to go.
I’ll tell you what, one thing I’ve learned through my many hiccups, embarrassments and failures is you can’t lose by staying true to yourself. It takes COURAGE and a lot of failure, but it will be worth it in the end. It’s cliche I know …but the world needs what is uniquely yours to give.