How to Find the Fruit in Failure

You've likely heard that our greatest gifts are found in our greatest challenges. But when those challenges include outright failure, how do we find the strength to even face the failure, much less dig deep enough to unearth the gifts?
 
If you're still feeling the black hole of failure in your life, here are some ways I've learned to empower yourself to find the fruit.
 
1. Don’t jump to the lessons too quickly.
One chapter of your life is not the whole story. Immediately after my teaching experience, I knew what my lesson was. It was multiple variations of the same theme, all with the same conclusion: I am never teaching again. But that was pain talking, not wisdom. And that leads us to #2.
 
2. Allow yourself time, space, and kindness to face the pain.
This is easier said than done. For me, it wasn't pretty. Shame was my primary emotion, and hiding was my primary tactic. I simply wanted to pretend it never happened. But the fact that it happened at my alma mater 30 minutes from my town meant that every alumni event invitation and every road sign leading to campus were daggers in the heart. There was nothing to do but simply experience it.
 
3. Recognize humility as the fruit.
Looking back, I think the most valuable lesson I learned was humility. I'm not sure I had ever failed quite so visibly before, and it wasn't that I wasn't capable of failing. It was that I had not put myself in situations that allowed me to fail. Interesting. That's also when I began to notice others sharing their stories of failure and what they had learned from it, which taught me that failure isn't something to be ashamed of; it's simply human.
 
4. When looking for lessons, take the long view.
Putting your failures in the context of their proper story is so important. It took ten years for me to see the story in which this experience played a pivotal role. It wasn't teaching per se that was the issue; it was the way I was making decisions in my life. I'm deep in the process of tracing the threads of that story as we speak, and weaving it into a new story of balance, joy, relationships, creativity, healing, and service. Now that I've learned to recognize my own yes and my own no, who knows? Teaching may be part of this future story.
 
Fortunately, failure doesn’t have to last forever. If you give it space, kindness, and the right care, fruit comes in its own time. And when it does, you’ll have a valuable gift to offer others—and transform your failure into gold.
You don’t have to fail, there is an option. That option is to learn. I teach a course about ‘’Sometimes you Win, Sometimes you Learn’’ It is more than a mindset it is a way of life. You see we learn more from losing than you do winning or succeeding. That being said you should never stop trying and you should always be learning. As long as you are learning and moving forward you are not losing. 
 
 
Brian P Swift  J.D. Coach – Business & Personal Strategist – Speaker [email protected] brianpswift.com
 
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