Oral East Africa>Success is being brave enough to court failure At the hut of the story

Written by Florence Riako Anam

One of the most memorable moments for me from the 2024 Olympics games was watching the British Olympic diver Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix break down and cry for being placed sixth in her event.

Her dad Fred Sirieix is seen supporting her and encouraging her.

The most profound part of this whole exchange was when Andrea says to her dad “It wasn’t meant to be” and to which he responds “It wasn’t meant to be today.” And she responds “and that is okay ”

WOW!

Failure is bad and hard and I do not like it. Yet, to succeed we must be willing to fail. We do not prepare enough to fail and often we beat ourselves up for it when it happens. For many of us this stops us from even attempting to move forward because, well- Failure is hard.

According to author John C Maxwell, “If you are not failing, you’re probably not really moving forward” So ideally, to get ahead, or to succeed one must really be willing to fail.

How then do you prepare to fail? Just like anything, planning to fail and creating a strategy to respond to failure go along way in getting past the hurdles and getting back on track towards your goal.

I do not think I was allowed to fail growing up. It was not okay, and I have struggled and continue to struggle with failing or not meeting expectations sometimes to the detriment of my own health. I am learning every day to embrace failure as part of life. Like many things I am unlearning to learn, this is still a work in progress.

Three Little Birds

Here are three tools I use and hopefully they can motivate you to create your own plan.

Feel my feelings:
In the past, whenever I did not accomplish something I really wanted to accomplish, or something did not turn out the way I wanted it to, or when I flat out failed at something, my immediate response was to minimize my feelings and emotions. I would convince myself that it did not matter at all or that I did not even care for whatever it was in the first place. Minimizing often then led to me abandoning the plans I had or goals I was hoping to achieve because, well it didn’t matter.

I also found that I gave up too quickly on things. Because of this I also then wasted a lot of time procrastinating over decisions or actions because I was scared to feel the pain of losing or failing. I do not do this anymore. I feel my feelings. I get angry or sad or cry. I will take a moment to experience my feelings. The whole range of them. The plan however is not to sit in it for so long. So I time myself. Depending on the gravity of the failure I allow myself a day, a week, or a month to moan/bitch/rant/cry. Once that time is up, I will myself to move ahead to how do I get back on track. I find that allowing myself the time or moments to acknowledge my pain gives me room to appreciate why I must try again.

Being a failure recoverist:
I learned this from Caroline Wanga. According to a video and post on Linkedin Ms. Wanga gives herself a threshold of “Five Fails a Day”. “I don’t get to declare it a bad day until I hit 6 fails ” Being a failure recoverist means I do not let one failure mess up your whole day or month. I expand the threshold for which I am allowed to ‘fold in’ and admit defeat or incapacity to accomplish.

I find it in me to find flickers of hope in what is working and focus there even if other components of my day are not. It also allows me the space to quickly admit when I have made a bad judgment or call and then find a way forward pretty quickly. In the wise words of John C Maxwell, “Fail early, fail often but always fail forward”

I am willing to walk back, to start again:
One of the things that stops a lot of people from taking the risks necessary for achieving their goals is failure.

I must say, as a mother or leader I have often found myself having to make decisions on the go sometimes without the full plan laid out. I get anxious when this happens because I am one of those people who love to see the whole plan before I leave the house. “You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – said Martin Luther King.

The muscle I have built over time is my ability to walk back and start fresh. I read this quote on the internet sometime back that I think resonates “You can get on the wrong bus but be quick out of the bus at the next stop” I think for as long as you are not willing to start fresh, you may not be willing to admit to yourself that you failed, or made a wrong turn or need to walk away. Of course, I will definitely take a moment to feel my feelings before I walk back and start again. But it is the willingness to do this that I find gives me the motivation to begin or start towards achieving my goals even when I have no clue what the whole plan looks like.