Failing Forward

I've been thinking a lot lately on the concept of recouping from a real or perceived failure. In business, they talk about failing forward by learning from the process in order to improve the overall product or service that was deemed to have failed to have met expectations. Today, in my regular day job, I encountered an amazing person who applied some of the concepts to personal life. And that got me to thinking...

In the course of my own personal life, failure comes typically related to what I call my "preordained expectations." I say preordained in the religious and hierarchal sense, in that the expectations take presidence over such things as, say, change or growth. Not to say it's right, but it's where I've most frequently found the source of the "failure."

Recently, I'd been using the language of "reinventing" my life when faced with personal crisis. Only today in talking with this amazing individual, did I find myself shifting my language to be as positive as I found him to be. Instead, I said "reorienting" my life. A subtle but important distinction and one that made me think, how do we go about shifting from the crisis mentality when failure rears its ugly head, to an adventure mentality, where the challenges faced might be looked upon as opportunities for change and growth?

I've heard a lot of people use the words "change oriented" and "growth oriented" and overall, to say one possesses these attributes appears to be a positive thing. I've never heard someone say that they are "expectation oriented" but in reality, this is what many of us do. We focus so excusively on the idealized outcome of our preordained expectations, that failure becomes critical, and will emerge into crisis.

With this in mind, I began to reconsider what preordained expectations I had that led me to this opportunity to fail forward in my life right now. The expectations, when they failed me, let me to feel the need to reinvent myself in order to survive the looming crisis. Taken from that perspective, it doesn't sound too fun, now does it?

Life, after all, is a journey and not a destination. If it were a destination, hurray to you and me, we made it...now what?

My "now what" begins by reorienting, and tossing aside the idea that I somehow need to reinvent myself, because my good old self just wasn't good enough for this crisis. So what do I want to reorient to? Change and growth. By shifting my perception of what is occurring, taking it out of failed expectations and embracing the idea an adventure is afoot, one what will require change and growth in their very process, I can reorient myself.

I walked by a man on Adams street today, on his cell phone asking someone to "talk me down!" as I was thinking of this. My immediate reaction was thinking that he's already on the ground, maybe he needs to know this and be reoriented to see where he is at. However, he was talking metaphorically, asking the person on the call to mentally help him get down from whatever it was that was upsetting him. I suspected a preordained expectation was at the core of whatever got him up there in the first place.

So, reorienting myself to shift my current view away from goals and outcomes, and back to the matter at hand, a process I don't like to be going through, it seems to me the only way to get it to be an adventure is going to be orienting myself toward change and growth.

When I do this, my possibilities include being able to use failing forward for my personal life. The failings can them be deconstructed and understood as gifts to learn from. In doing so over the past 5 months, I've made some remarkable discoveries. There were reasons that the gifts of failure entered into my life, due to my inattention to smaller things. In business they'd call it the product flaws, or unanticipated costs in service delivery. In my life, I'll just call them the quirky nature of who I am.

By attending to those quirky aspects, in a mindset where I am on a growth and change oriented adventure, there are greater opportunities, expanded horizons, in which to view where and what I will reorient to. Of course, those quirky aspects of me had value at some point, so they'll be coming along for the journey, too. But I expect that the experience of learning from the process will refine them, make them sharper and more focused, and a gift comes from that as well.

I didn't start being me when the crisis/adventure hit, and I won't stop being me once it's over. There's less a need to reinvent who I am and a greater need to mindfully fail forward, revoking the power and priviledge I'd given my preordained expectations, and shifting that to the process of growth and change as a part of the journey.

How about you?