Failure

We are not perfect.  Our lives are littered with failures and struggles, deficiencies and weaknesses.  With our best foot forward, we can still fall flat on our faces.  Sometimes life isn’t perfect and other times a silver lining needs to be muzzled.  We need to feel failure and experience pain.  We need to embrace imperfections and faults.  Because our biggest lessons in life almost always come from our mistakes, not our successes.

I am sure that we all wish we could rewind a moment or two.  We wish we could take back a fight or an accident.  We all make mistakes.  There are so many times I  wish I could undo a moment, an experience, a reaction.  I wish I could go back in time and do it all over.  There are memories I wish I could take back, I wish never existed.  There are apologies I had to make for things that I wish weren’t my fault.  There were times when the weight of everything was almost too heavy to hold.  But in the reality of the world, no one is perfect.  And among all of those imperfections there were also a lot of great times.  There was a lot of learning and growing.  There were friendships formed and relationships built.  Failure is more of a beginning than an end.  We don’t learn very much when we do it right the first time.  The struggle is where we flourish.

We are given so few opportunities to openly talk about our failures.  We thrive on our successes and the success of others.  So often we forget those paths that brought us to where we are were littered with failures and disappointments.  In the studio, failure is embraced.  The best lesson I learned early on in my training, “you are only as strong as your weakest point.”  That is so true to everything in life, but especially to your strength training.  If you can’t hold a strong plank, you can’t do a push up.  If you can’t hang from the bar for 10 seconds, you can’t do a pull up.  And both of those are the beginning to finding success in the those moves, not the ending.  Find success in a plank, and a push up might not be very far off.  These weak points don’t show that we can’t become, they just show us where to begin.  They allows us to look at our point of failure and make that stronger.  And the only way to find that is to fail.

So many of us prepare a world for our children where success is praised and celebrated.  We reward success, no matter how false it is.  We look at failure as that.  But failure is our opportunity to prepare our children and ourselves for what comes next.  You are not perfect.

Learning to apologize, learning to accept defeat, learning that other people are just better than you at things.  Those are places to start, places to grow.  As a parent, it is hard to see my minis fail.  I want to make a world for them that is bubbled wrapped with pockets of perfection.  Unfortunately, that is not possible.  Instead, teaching my boys to fail gracefully seemed to be the next best thing.  Letting them learn their own lessons and not forcing mine on them, is really hard but also part of the process.

As my minis got older, I made the conscious effort to allow them to own their successes.  As a parent, you don’t get to rise above when things are good and point fingers when things go wrong.  As a parent it is my job to high five the good and hug the hardships.  My job is to let them make the decisions and learn to take ownership of those decisions.  What good is it to dilute their success and then dissociate from the failures.  The same is true in the gym.  When an athlete pulls a personal record deadlift, that is their win, not mine.  I am just lucky enough to be there for the high fives.  And when an athlete fails a lift that they got two months ago, I usually let them throw a tantrum.  But then we get to work.  We find their point of failure and they work from there.

What if in the new year we embraced our failures.  We took those moments when maybe we said too much, or we yelled too loud.  Those moments when we didn’t get the job because we weren’t good enough or we missed a car payment because we forgot.  Or maybe that time we even dislocated a hip trying to do the splits (that’s a failure hopefully only I have to own).

You are not perfect.  And enjoy a world where failures are the best tools to teach us how to be stronger.  Allow for the tantrums and the tears.  Allow for the disappointment and unfairness.  But remember that you are not alone.  Some of us have to learn a lot more lessons and make a lot more apologies, but fuck we are learning a lot.  We are becoming better at everything with every misstep.