Reframing failure

As 2020 continues to be the longest year ever, you’ve decided a daily workout would be good for your health and sanity. You find a 30-day yoga program online and even recruit some friends as accountability partners. The first couple days are great and by the end of the first week, you’re really finding your flow (yes that was a yoga pun). 

And then it happens…

On day nine, you fall asleep on the couch after putting the kids to sleep instead of doing your daily yoga class. The next night, you’re staring at your shared Google Doc knowing you can’t check off day nine in good faith and suddenly you’re eating ice cream out of the container instead of getting back on track. 

You have FAILED. 

Or did you?

It’s easy to treat success and failure as an “either or” equation but when we do so, we often shortchange the progress we have made.

There is a lot of space between being a massive success and complete failure. 

Let’s revisit our example above to explain further.

Will you be able to say you completed the 30-day challenge by doing yoga each day? No.

Did you go from doing no yoga to doing yoga eight days in a row before taking a break? Yes.

So is “success” being able to say you did yoga 30 days in a row? Or is “success” building an exercise habit – even if it is one that you don't execute on perfectly all the time?

When your definition of success calls for perfection, you’ve already purchased a one-way ticket to Failuresville. Instead, try reframing success as the process of continuously taking actions that put you closer to your stated goals.

For instance, let’s say you have $30k saved for home renovations and want to hit $100k by the end of next year. Then at the end of next year, you end up with only $90k saved of your $100k goal.

Did you hit your stated goal of $100k saved? No. But did you demonstrate your ability to save $60k in a year towards a stated goal that matters to you? You most certainly did.

So let’s reframe our definition of success versus failure. Rather than planning on and for perfection, let’s acknowledge that things both within and outside of our control are likely to knock us off track along the way to our stated goals. And when that happens, let’s recognize that does not make us a failure. We only fail if we don’t pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and get back on track.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a yoga class to do...

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