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We are most often educated to have no weaknesses, simply to be the best. Many of us had parents who pushed and even threatened us with punishment if we were not performing well in school. No wonder that our CVs for job applications must always look perfect, no weaknesses, no ups and downs in the career: “the only way is up”. During my career as coach, I met CEOs who officially declare that “failure is not an option”.

But is our life only based on success? Not really. Most of us also experienced not to succeed, to come home with a bad grade or not having passed an exam, not being the best in class and then to feel the frustration and anger caused by it.

Failure can happen to us at any moment even if we have the best diploma, the best parents, the best trainer or coach. In some countries like America, failure is easier to digest than in traditional western European countries like France and Germany. In this context I remember an old American jazz song with lyrics that fit very well to this attitude: “Dust yourself off and start all over again”. In most European countries, also including Romania, failure is mostly a tabu. We don’t want to speak about it, just good news. Once you fail in these societies, you have a stigma, a label that remains with you forever.

What is a failure really? It is the opposite of winning, both are two sides of the same coin. We all intuitively feel that both winning and losing, succeeding and failing are part of our lives, but we don’t really integrate them in our thinking. It just remains an empty shell. Is failure such a bad thing? What if failure contains major learning lessons for our lives? What if failure is a good indicator for a change in attitude, approach, methodology or in priorities?

Companies seem to have taken notice of the importance of using failure for improvement. At least, there is a lot of talk about creating a culture where errors are possible. Just imagine what would happen if there was a safe space where people are allowed to fail if they really learn from it. Can we encourage people to be more daring if they know it may also not work? A famous football coach once said: “If the goal getter is allowed to miss the goal sometimes, he will score better”. What a wise attitude!

Allowing failure in our society is a tremendous task, companies may be the front runners here. It would mean to wipe out a lot of false beliefs we still carry around with us. Failing has many benefits, indeed; it may reinforce resilience, to try again, to try harder. This is very true in sport, for example. But it may also guide us to take smarter decisions. Finally, we may get valuable hints for our personal development. There are many people in the workplace, especially in management, who are permanently stressed out, pushed beyond their capacity and at some stage fail. Perhaps they are simply not in the right place. I have met some of these people who only after a so called “failure”, completely reoriented their professional lives, found their calling.

It goes without saying that creating a safe space for failure should not invite us to be lazy, not to try out new things and discover our limits, on the contrary. It would give us more power to experiment, to gain more satisfaction and fulfilment in life. Some years ago, I was in San Francisco and discovered a profound sentence somewhere on the ground floor of a parking lot: “You are disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you do not try”. We have too many people in their old age who regret not doing things they wanted to do in life because of fear. Let’s not make the same mistake.

Dr. Michael Schroeder

michael.schroeder@linarson.com

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