Or do you feel like you can't win for losing?
What if we told you that you can't win unless you are willing to lose? A lot.
In his best-selling book
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell shares the secrets of highly successful people, from violin virtuosos to Microsoft's Bill Gates. What these top performers have in common is not natural talent (though there's that too), but a willingness to devote countless hours to practicing their craft.
In other words, highly successful people are willing to fail. A lot.
Gladwell estimates it takes roughly 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in a field. These hours include lots of fumbles, flat notes and false starts. They don't include the failure to keep trying.
If failing is necessary for achieving success, how do we move beyond our seemingly inborn and often incapacitating fear of failure? Two words:
Play more.
Play naturally encourages us to take healthy risks, test our boundaries, and seek novel experiences and new ways of doing things.
When we're playing around, we're more willing to fail because the stakes aren't as high. After all, it's only a game and we're just having run, right? Yes and no.
Playful challenges strengthen our courage, grit, perseverance, and self-efficacy—all vital skills for addressing our real-life challenges.
There are many ways play helps us learn from failure, like the integrity lessons we explore in this month's blog,
"Playing to Win."
Play encourages us to take risks that support growth and transformation, a gameful approach we use in our
individual life coaching and
organizational trainings.
Play also helps us move from a traditional win/lose competitive mindset to a win/win co-opetive mindset that encourages collaboration and creativity—a shift that produces better outcomes and greater personal rewards.
Need help overcoming your fear of failure?
Professional coaching can help you meet whatever challenge you may be facing—whether it involves your career, personal relationships, health, a life transition or all of the above (in that case, call immediately!).
We offer in-person and phone-based
fun coaching sessions that can help you overcome your fears and have fun in the process (talk about a win/win!).
Email us to learn more!
Ginny and Jen
The Fun Conspiracy
