Little Notes: Permission to Fail

This post is more for me than it is for anyone else, but I know I’m not the only one who could use the reminder that, if not life or death, failure is fine and progress is rarely linear. Sometimes, often times, I have to remind myself that not everything I do needs to be done at the highest level of effort or skill. It’s a little bit exhausting which is why I’m writing this post and giving both myself and you reading this the permission to fail.

When I set goal for myself and have been consistent in my progress, sometimes I get worried that any hiccup will throw me completely off course and that making up ground will be extremely hard. I’m not wrong to be concerned, sometimes making up ground is extremely hard. The worst type of hiccup for my already hypersensitive view of progress to manage is failure. But failure is necessary. Failure teaches us very valuable things. Things like maybe the schedule I’m keeping needs to be adjusted, a material I’m using would be better for different application, there were factors affecting an outcome I didn’t know need to be accounted for, and so on.

So here I am face to face with this lesson again. You have permission to fail and you have permission to try again. Take a beat and then give it another go. The only real failure on this path of progress is giving up on yourself. Everything else is just part of the process.

Truly,

Claire