On Forgiving Yourself When You Fail…

Failing isn’t fun. But it is necessary.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Fail forward”. Cliché aside, it really is true. You have to fail. You need to fail. And whether you like it or not, you WILL fail.

In failing, we learn resilience. We figure out what to do differently next time. While we might embrace this idea logically, when we arrive at a failure it can be a much tougher pill to swallow.

Failure can be as small as snoozing your alarm when you promised yourself you would wake up early or skipping out on your habits when you said you would follow through this time. Some failures are worse than others, and some have far worse consequences.

No matter where you find yourself on that spectrum, the way you react will determine how things go from here. Now is not the time to beat yourself up. It’s not the time to wish things happened differently, because they didn’t.

It’s time to acknowledge what happened and give yourself grace within that space. Yes, you can do both at the same time. Tough love has it’s place, but self love better be right there next to it.

Next time you find yourself in the midst of failure, remember that you’re human. It’s tough out here, okay? We’ve got a lot on our plates and sometimes things will slip through the cracks. It’s alright.

Accept your humanness in all that it is, and resolve to do better next time. Don’t make excuses. Instead, make a plan. Find out where you went wrong. Pick yourself up and try again.

Forgive and fail forward.