Failure and Learning

This is a great message and technique to incorporate into a session about letting failure go.   The video is short and worth listening to all of it, but if you are impatient skip to minute 7 and listen to the last five minutes.

Inner Voices:   We all have inner negative headsets that we learned as kids.   It boils down to: 

Don't Make A Mistake
Don't Make A Mistake

Then there is the "mistake" moment.   We cringe ....   Think of your last mistake -- personal or at work.     Feel what your body does -- the cringe, the shame.  What does it feel like.    That's what is stopping us from learning from mistakes or failure.

Our body gives in to the mistake.  It's like gumby doing the bidding.   I made a mistake!

No matter you learned this as a child - in school or whatever.    As an adult, it probably still haunts you.   It keeps you from being creative, stops us, but here is a technique to get past it:  The failure bow.

Coming to Terms With A Mistake So You Can Learn

Trapeze artists do it, improvisers, gymnists

Don't go into cringe mode, do this:

(1)   Raise hands to offer it up and let it go

(2)   Dumb ass grin like a dog being trained and uses submission

(3)   Say thank you I failed and move on

Don't walk into a meeting late and raise your hands and shout this, but you can do it under the table

If you incorporate the failure bow,  you are not glorifying failure - but rewarding the transparency, being accountable, being in the present, and paving the way to innovation.

Visuals to incorporate

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/galleries/72157632309133445/