Publication History:

Health 24 Magazine, January 2009

Wow! what an eye opener for someone like me who dare not venture out of her comfort zone. The article has given me the confidence, the boost I require. I have read the article many times. A big thank you to Corrina; I do hope many others will benefit from it” – S.T.

What does it mean to fail? What does the word ‘fail’ do to you? Take a moment to pause, reflect, feel, answer that question.

For many of us, failing is a negative experience, one to avoid at all costs. Maybe it’s because it could confirm our deepest fear of ourselves as flawed and as faulty, and so we take any path but ‘that one’.

We can stay avoiding failure forever. We have that choice. We can hold ourselves back, make excuses, remain small. We can keep within the confines of our comfort zone, stay insignificant, stay invisible.

But there’s always something more compelling and more powerful than our fears. When we take a look at the world, we know without any doubt that we’re being called to act – and that we’re being called to act now. To step up and contribute, to give 100%, to share all of us. At the Transition Town conference earlier this year, I watched The Age of Stupid, a scarily moving reminder of runaway climate change being less than seven years away, and it struck me: there is no more time for us to use discomfort around failure as an excuse. It’s time to to do the things we know it’s right to do, possibility of failure and all.

Bring to mind inspirational people, whose actions have touched your life. You’ve probably read about many of them here in this very magazine. Imagine what you would have lost… what our Earth would have lost… if they had succumbed to their fear of failure. Instead, they allowed their spirit to lead them where the failure-shy would not tread.

Now picture your own life, laid out before you in glorious technicolour. Get a solid visual – maybe you see the places you normally go, the people you usually interact with. Get a sense of its abundant possibilities. Now, picture big grey blotches over certain areas. These represent the actions and encounters you avoid because you’re scared they’ll lead to failure. Identify three of these now. Actually get pen and paper and draw three big blotches. In each, write one thing you don’t currently do because you don’t want to fail. Take a moment to consider the impact – on you, on others, on our Earth. You may start to get a sense of how fear of failing pollutes your life and suffocates your ability to engage, act, influence and impact.

It is blatantly obvious that we have failed to look after our planet. We don’t know whether it will exist in an inhabitable state for our generation, let alone the next. I believe that every person has a solution to offer and yet so often we don’t take action, in case we fail. The paradox is that our fear of failure leads us to the very thing we are trying to avoid. Fear of failure leads us to procrastinate and it paralyses us. Neither of these will help us in answering our Earth’s urgent call to action.

In these transition years ahead, we as individuals and as a collective society will be failing again and again – trying one solution, tweaking, finding another, falling on our faces. We need to know how to embrace that as a process and just keep on going. We need to find new, empowered perspectives on failure so that we can get moving, make things happen. We need to have a goal and a purpose which we will not be distracted from, not matter how often failure rears its head.

What do we look like without fear of failing?

We contribute what we are right now, flawed as that may appear. We embolden ourselves to give what we’ve got, instead of waiting to be perfect. We know that what we’re striving for is worth risking failure for.

We are easier on ourselves and easier on others, accepting and forgiving our mistakes instead of judging and condemning. As with babies learning to walk, we see our falls as part of our journey and encourage each other to keep going.

We dismantle the hierarchy our society sets up between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and recognise that we are all interdependent, all equal. We hold the knowledge that a person does not lose their inherent value when they don’t live up to expectations.

We acknowledge with open eyes our Oil Age addictions and where we’ve been barking up the wrong tree. This enables us to come down gracefully and cut our losses, instead of plugging away, desperately trying to avoid the definition ‘failure’.

We are free to be full participants of life, right here in the moment, letting go of past mistakes, facing the future head on. There is so much more life available to us when we’re not constantly trying to navigate around fear-of-failure holes in the road.

Ultimately, we see how desperately the human spirit wants to take risks. To push forward to the next level of impact, contribution and fulfilment. When we allow fear of failure to rule our actions, we limit ourselves. Let’s allow that human spirit to be in charge from now on.

© Corrina Gordon-Barnes, 2008. All rights reserved.