It took me a while to write this blog post because until now I actually didn’t understand how important it is to fail at doing something. I have always been really bad at dealing with things that I am bad at. I always felt embarrassed or awkward if I didn’t know or I couldn’t do something. And that is the worst way to tackle a challenge. If you are not comfortable with being bad at something you are going to avoid learning and you are not going to progress.

For example I used to get frustrated when I played golf that I am inconsistent and I stopped playing for a while. I realised that I just wasn’t putting the time and wasn’t eager to continue the lessons because I simply didn’t like not being good at it. Which is really silly. How else should I become better? After I got over myself I went back into playing golf and I am still not great but I am much more consistent.

Failing used to have a very negative connotation for me because it translated directly to “I am not good enough”. A lot of things like: not getting the best possible mark in school, not getting someone to like me or not being able to swim were failures in my book. It took me a while to understand that being an adult that cannot swim it doesn’t mean I failed at something. It doesn’t even mean that my parents failed at something just because they didn’t have the means to pay for swimming lessons. It just means that I need to learn when I have the chance. At the moment I am learning how to swim and I have been lucky enough to live by the Baltic Sea this summer, so today, even if the water was 19 degrees and it was raining outside, I went in the water and tried just a bit more! I transformed the old failure into a success because I am progressing and I feel more comfortable every time I do go in the water.

I named this article “Fail At Something Every Day” because I wanted to stress that failure is something that should occur as often as possible. And is tightly associated with challenging yourself. The wonderful thing is that when you associate the failure, which always used to be negative, with challenge and progress, it will become very soon a positive thing. Yes, sometimes it might be embarrassing to admit that you don’t know something and it might feel difficult when you break something in your daily job or you disrupt something, but ultimately this is the only way to push yourself. And in the end you are going to see that pushing yourself to improve things is what is giving you an edge. An edge in your job or in your personal life. Lately I have been pushing myself in all kind of situations, to try and overcome some of my fear of failure.

I have been speaking up at work and tried new things and sometimes my ideas worked out really well. Sometimes not so great. And that is ok. The ideas that were taken forward were really useful for the project and the more ideas I put on the table, the better chances are some will bring success.

I have been speaking Swedish almost the whole time while in Sweden even though my Swedish is far from perfect. I have been studying very hard for the last few years and the thought of speaking with someone from the shops for example used to terrify me last year, now I am not defaulting to English, I try and I try in Swedish, and it starts to become easier and easier. I managed to break out of the bad pattern of feeling bad because I am not speaking correctly. I choose to feel great instead, because I leave in London and I can speak Swedish fluently – not easily achieved.

I also stopped feeling bad for myself because x or y friend doesn’t put enough efforts to organise things, and is mostly me doing the organising. I stopped seeing this as a failure in my social life. Instead, I looked for more people and formed more meaningful relationships with friends that actually want to do a lot of things. I now have a fantastic circle of friends with common interests. And the friends that are not always so responsive are still there sometimes and that is great, no pressure, no failure on either part. I managed my expectations and I stopped seeing some relationships as failures just because the other people were not ready to invest the time. Is their time and they should prioritise it as they like, what does that even have to do with me? Why should I be so entitled to their own time? I took what I perceived as a “failure” and transformed it into a positive experience, I found new friends!

It was a long journey for me to realise that failing is actually a good thing. I changed some patterns and started to think differently about things. I became less overly cautious and more confident since I am not worried about not being good at something . I don’t need to be good at everything, I just need to be a bit better than yesterday. Improving yourself is a success regardless of where you are in your life and you can only improve if you stumble, fall and get back again!