Please Fail
Failure is such a powerful word. We say it when we fall down. We say it when we make mistakes. We say it when we lose. It is a word that we are afraid of, a word that we shy away from. The negative connotations surround each and every definition of the word. And yet our greatest successes come from the lessons we learned when failure was the outcome. In all honesty, it is the beginning of everything good, it is the foundation for creating progress and achievements in everything we do. Failure is the starting point for what comes next, what lies ahead.
We need to fail more often. We need to look at an obstacle and allow ourselves the confidence to accept that we don’t have to get it right the first time. We need to embrace failure to find where our weak points are. And it is acceptable to throw a tantrum or two in the learning processes. Personally, I have the ability to throw a tantrum that would make a 2-year-old envious. *Funny Fact: I don’t usually fail at tantrums.* In those moment of pure failure, I HATE IT. Specifically, I hate failing at my deadlift. Those days I feel 100 percent and every warm up set feels amazing. The music is right, the energy is pulsing through me and then I go to pull my heavy single off the ground and it just won’t budge. Failure will overwhelm me. I will swear, I will threaten to kick something, anything. I will get pissed and want to blame any and everybody but myself. But after those few initial moments, those first tantrums, the frustration subsides and I come back for more. I come back stronger and maybe a little angrier (but the good kind of angry). I come back hungry for what lies ahead. Because I know I need to fail, I know I need to know that I am pushing myself beyond my comfort zone, beyond my abilities.
The most important thing about failure is to move forward from that point. Don’t relish in it, don’t let it take over. The lessons are there for us to learn and it is our job to take those lessons and do it better the next time. I find it so easy to talk about failure when I’m discussing strength. For example, if you are trying to get a one rep max in your deadlift and you are lifting a gajillion pounds. Just joking. You are trying to lift 315lbs (three big girl plates on each side of the bar), maybe you can’t get it off the ground, or maybe you can’t quite lock it out on the top, or worse, maybe your back tries to give out half way up. You need to know this. You need to know your weaknesses under absolute strength. If you always succeed you will never fully reach your potential. You may never know what your weak spots are, you may never know how far you can really push yourself.
I have two clients that are training for a Powerlifting meet in December. Both of them are training for failure. At first they weren’t happy. I had them do max reps on the bench press until they literally couldn’t lift the bar. I had them do triples in the squat at a weight they thought they could only do singles at. There were a few rough days in the beginning, a few days of frustration and that negative feeling that only failure can bring. But a little reminder of how strong they really are, a reminder that failure is going to be celebrated and a huge ass high five at the end of their workouts has them trusting their strengths and their abilities. And as they are entering into their second month of training, their max reps are going up, they are hitting all five sets of triples at 185lbs. Failure isn’t easy, but the rewards can be incredible. The roof is raised higher than they thought possible.
Failure creeps into our worlds no matter what. We fail at just about everything in our life span. We fail at the perfect cake. We fail at not staining that white dress shirt. We fail at keeping our screen time to less than 30 minutes a day. But we still try again. We still open up the cookbook for the birthday season and maybe read a little more closely. Maybe next time we drink coffee out of the cup with a lid when we are wearing that nice new shirt. And maybe we try every day to spend a little less time on our screens, and today it might not be perfect and next month might now be perfect, but it might be a little better than it was, than it used to be.
Succeeding is over rated. When you come out of every situation feeling like you won, what do you really learn? When you stand up from every squat and never drop the bar, do you honestly know if that is the heaviest it could be, if you are the strongest you can be. Failure is not easy. But it has the potential to teach us our weakest points. It has the potential to teach us who to rely on, how to push through when we don’t want to. Failure has a strong lesson to teach us, and that is to get back up and start again with a little more knowledge than we had the previous time.