Failure doesn’t exist.
Before you click away or fire off an email telling me I’ve lost the plot – hear me out.
I’m not saying things don’t go wrong, because they do, often and messily, and I’m not suggesting we skip merrily past our mistakes with a tambourine and a fixed grin either — pretending otherwise is avoidance in a sparkly costume, and that’s not what this is about. What I am saying is that the word failure, and everything we’ve been conditioned to attach to it, is doing us significant damage – and I think it’s time we had a proper look at it.
What we actually mean when we say failure.
Cast your mind back to the last time you told yourself you’d failed at something. Really go there for a moment. Feel the weight of that word – what it does to you physically when you’re wearing it.
Now ask yourself: what actually happened?
Something didn’t go the way you planned, a result didn’t materialise the way you’d hoped, and instead of getting curious about why, you reached for the heaviest word in the English language and dropped it on yourself. We’ve been taught to treat failure as a verdict – as proof the case is closed and it’s time to retreat – and the real damage isn’t the thing that went wrong, it’s the story we pile on top of it about what that means.
F.A.I.L
Here’s the reframe I’ve been using for years, with myself and with clients, and it’s a simple one.
F.A.I.L stands for Formative And Important Learning — which is really all it ever was. Every single thing we label as a failure is, underneath the story we’ve piled on top of it, a piece of information – something that didn’t work, which means we now know something we didn’t know before, and we have data about what to do differently next time.
The question shifts from what did I do wrong to what did I learn, and that one tiny shift changes everything – not because it makes the disappointment disappear, but because it keeps the door open instead of slamming it shut.
Some of the most formative moments of my life would have looked, from the outside, like catastrophic failures – the corporate career I walked away from, the relationship I chose to leave, and everything that came after. Every single one delivered teachings I’m still drawing on today, and I genuinely wouldn’t swap any of them, not because I enjoyed them at the time, but because of who they made me. There’s a word for that kind of transformation – alchemy – and it’s available to anyone willing to stop treating their hardest moments as verdicts and start treating them as fuel.
The Practical Bit
Think about something you’ve been carrying the failure label around – something that’s been sitting heavily, maybe for a long time, shaping what you believe you’re capable of.
Write it down, and then underneath it write these three headings:
What actually happened – just the facts, as if you were describing it to a stranger with no drama attached.
What I learned – look for the real teachings, not the surface ones.
What I’d do differently – not as a stick to beat yourself with, but as honest, useful information for next time.
Then, and this is the important part, write this at the bottom: this experience is now in the museum. It belongs to the past. I carry the learning forward, not the label.
Because that’s all failure ever was.
#UnleashYourAwesome