We all fail at something and multiple stages throughout life. The majority of our lives we are taught to be risk adverse and show that we are in control, so failing at something may represent a lack of control.
Even though people can and should fail we spend most of our time avoiding it at all costs. Individuals are more preoccupied with what others will think if they do fail? Or if they do fail at something, their thoughts are filled with well what was the point in doing all that work for nothing.
I was recently at a major national sporting competition and people had subjected to themselves that they were going to fail even before they had started the contest.
A human mind is a wonderfully interesting machine. I know that I used failure sometimes in the wrong way, mentally beating myself up after I thought I had underperformed, or slowly dwelling on the thing that went wrong. Both a huge waste of time. Now there is no failure, things have progressed significantly.
So coming back on point why is failure important? We don't learn any other way. I encourage failure now amongst my students although we don't class it as the failure (it's learning).
The first step is to learn from each Failure.
No matter how well planned out things are failure can and will happen. You can choose to be disappointed, afraid, embarrassed, doubt yourself. All these types of thoughts can quickly consume us. The challenging thing to do is to review what just happened. What did go well? What additions would you add into a future similar situation? What traits do you need to ingrain and develop to ensure you manage yourself better next time around?
The second step is to reflect.
The deeper the insight you have into the failure means you raise your awareness and perception very quickly. You pick yourself back up again and keep moving forward.
The third step is to ingrain this into a feedback loop.
Having this as part of your daily routine will quickly raise your awareness on where you're going wrong. The more you apply it, the quicker you'll figure out the right solution.
A lot of individuals problems and failures are a result of them having a huge lack of awareness. Once awareness is upgraded people begin to think on a whole different level.
Awareness is one of the main areas we focus on at The Invictus Project.