The “F” word is it really all that bad?

The “F” word I am referring to is FAILURE. In my work as a coach and also as a manager i seem to run into my fair share of perfectionists. I am certainly all for giving your best effort in any situation. However, when it begins to have an emotional and physical effect on your life I have to wonder where the benefits of striving for perfection are. What does perfection cost you physically and emotionally? Now I have to be honest, there was a time in my life when I could not be with failure. I wanted everything to be perfect and in terms of work I would put in extra hours to ensure that everything was done just the way that i wanted. Somewhere along the line I let it all go. At some point in my life I began to look at failure not as doom and gloom, but rather as an opportunity to make a different choice and switch things up. The interesting thing is that you will often end up with the same end result in less time with less frustration and stress and you will often experience a great deal of powerful learning as well. There are many famous people who failed over and over again before they reached their goals. I can only imagine that failure provided them with many different perspectives that eventually led to success. So perhaps failure leads to perfection???

So let’s look at a different perspective. What if in every situation we made a conscious effort to have “FUN” and experience joy? How would things be different? We only need to look to kids to see a great example of how to have fun and be present in the moment. Is it possible to have fun in every situation with everything that we do? Can you give yourself permission to have fun and release some of the stress? I work in an extremely fast paced work environment that can be quite stressful at the best of times. I can tell you that when we are having fun as a team it becomes almost effortless. We look out for each other and jump in when something goes wrong and we laugh when we make a mistake. The customers seem to enjoy this environment as well. When we are not having fun you can feel it in the air and we are struggling to achieve our goals.

I realize that this is a big topic for lot’s of folks and that there are many layers to it. The question is can you choose a different perspective? Can you make a different choice that allows you to still reach your goal?

Success and Failure

Recently I have seen and heard lots of discussion around the idea of success and failure. The F word is certainly something that we can struggle with. Below there is a link to a great TED talk:

Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure — and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.

Enjoy the video.

Alain De Botton TED talk

Ode to Joy

I googled “Joy” and the video below was in the top 3. I love it. I mean, who doesn’t love The Muppets? Perhaps it’s a reminder, of what happens when we forget about following our joy and take life or ourselves to seriously.
Enjoy