How to Know If Failure is Helping or Hurting Personal Growth
Failure is a necessary part of the growth process. If failure is not part of the process, then your goals aren’t big enough. Failure breeds growth, and growth breeds progress. However, there is one caveat to this that many don’t understand. If you are not mentally prepared to grow when you experience failure, the failure is more likely to hurt than help.
Unfortunately, failure doesn’t always breed growth; it only has the potential to breed growth. In youth sports in particular, it’s common to hear parents and coaches tell young athletes after they lose that there’s no such thing as failure, only learning. While this is a great nurturing statement to make a child feel better, the reality is when you aren’t ready to learn failure is just failure.
In fact, there is one characteristic that lets you know when a failure is just a failure. In simply comes down to how many times one has failed by making the same exact mistakes. If someone keeps failing because of the same mistakes, then they have made failure a habit. Failure in this case is hurting way more than it will ever help because bad habits are extremely difficult to break.
On the other hand, if one fails as a result of new mistakes, and corrects previous mistakes then the failure is helping. Failure must not only expose an opportunity ripe for growth, the one experiencing that failure must also take advantage of the opportunity.
In short, if someone isn’t mentally ready to take advantage of learning from failure and/or doesn’t have a coach who can help them learn, it’s best to avoid repeating the same failures over and over as nothing helpful will come from it.