The Art of Failing Forward: The Surprising Path to Success

I failed spectacularly!

It sucked!

I really hope you fail too!

In fact, I really hope you're going to fail soon.

My great wish for you is that you fail a whole load – over and over and over again. 

Perhaps you’re looking for the unsubscribe button and thinking – “Ann, you have finally lost it” 

But before you flip away, please watch the video to find out why failure is my greatest wish for you…

You are going to fail! 

Recently I got my yacht skipper's sailing licence.  

The first week was all theory and I got reminded that I love to win!

I love to succeed.

I love to do well.

There’s a super needy nerd inside me that craves approval (I know, it’s not cool to admit that) and the best way it knows how is to do well in tests.

My little (actually rather big) success monster got well fed during the theory part as I blitzed my exams and thrived on plotting courses and working out tidal streams.

But then along came the week of practical sailing!!!

I have sailed extensively, but always as crew or doing navigation, and had very little experience handling the boat in and out of moorings and marina and under its engine. To get my skipper's licence, this had to be mastered.

I had to do it under sail and under motor. Coming in on the port side, coming in on the starboard side, coming in backwards even!

This I found darn quite scary. Maneuvering this big yacht around with a lot of other yachts around that cost quite a lot of money that I could bash into. 

I flashed back to those days of learning how to drive but this time with a much bigger, and way more expensive - a big yacht. 

I was with other learners too doing their thing and they all just seemed to get it perfectly right - going back and forth in and out of the docks with ease. That made me more tense.

And then my worst nightmare happened. In one particular maneuver I managed to come in and spectacularly "F’ed" it up! 

Yip, I got nervous and spun the helm the wrong way, resulting in a spectacularly impressive (and loud) crash into the dock. 

Boom – the yacht crashed into the dock!

As the marina reverberated with the impact, heads started popping up like groundhogs, over the railings of the other yachts where all the residents and yachties were peacefully having their breakfast.

I felt mortified! 

I had made a mistake!

I had failed! 

Everyone else had succeeded and I hadn’t.

Now here’s my truth.

I felt awful. I felt ashamed. I felt “NOT ENOUGH”.

For a good day I raged inside, tormenting myself and resisting any attempts by any one to try to make me feel better.

I berated myself up with choice phrases guaranteed to enhance my worthlessness.

• "You’re a total mess up, Ann" 
• "You can't do this"
• “you’re just not good enough”
• “How stupid were you to think you could do this” 
• "You should give this up because you obviously don’t have what it takes"

and those are the ones I can include in a blog…

And then I remember to use one of my super powers.

This is one of the key techniques I know to significantly enhance my overall wealthy life experience. 

This is also helping me learn new things, bring more things abundantly into my world, and this is why, I believe, I live such a juicy life. 

I've learned how to fail well. 

Do you know how to fail well?

The way to fail well is to wallow. 

Dive in and wholeheartedly feel as crappy as you possibly can. 

Instead of the “pull yourself out of your funk” strategy of saying something along the lines of… 

….“don't be stupid, "suck it up, everybody fails, it's part of learning" and so on… (which is just another way of making yourself feel wrong because now you are telling yourself you can’t even do failure well,)…

Acknowledge that it feels crap, it feels shit to fail!

I know that the fastest path for me to get where I want to be… which is to not feel crap is to go through the crap!

Instead of saying "Come on, Ann, pull yourself towards yourself, get over it", I must give myself space to feel what I'm feeling.

To acknowledge… “ouch, yeah, this feels crappy!”

The more I'm able to go towards that feeling of failure and be with the stuff that comes up …

…to sit with it and not make the feeling or me wrong…

...the quicker I'm able to move through it and learn from it and continue with the journey and adventure I am seeking.

Rather than beating myself up and resisting the feeling I most fear (failure) -  which would more than likely make me get off the yacht – I must stay with me and feel crap. 

Your freedom is through the door of the emotion you dread the most, and that is why I'm asking you to fail.

You cannot learn without failing.

You cannot grow without failing. 

Your failure might not be as spectacular as smashing a yacht into a dock. 

Your failure may be significantly more spectacular. 

You might lose some money.

You might have some uncomfortable situations with people.

You might let someone down.

You might disappoint some people. 

BUT…

…only through your failure are you going to experience the life you really yearn for. 

For me the greatest tragedy is…

…as adults, we've become terrified of making a mistake. 

We've become terrified of failure and that is why my great hope for you is that you are going to go ahead and fail spectacularly and enjoy it (after you’ve felt crap of course). 

Let’s do this.. 

…Right now, think of something you can go out and consciously fail at? 

Maybe it's baking cupcakes that you know are going to flop. 

Try something new. 

I've decided to teach myself how to crochet. I know I'm going to fail spectacularly - and then I’m going to succeed. 

Maybe for you it's learning about investing and getting your index tracker portfolio set up. If you haven’t yet watched the free Savvy Investing Masterclass I’ve created for you, you can get access to it now by clicking on this sentence. 

There is a saying we learn by taking action.

Actually we only learn if we take action, fail, feel the crappiness of that failure and then… glean the lessons from the failure and take a new set of actions based on that learning. 

Failing to feel and then learn… that’s real failure.

I've now learnt how to be a great yacht skipper by crashing into a dock. 

Thanks to my failure I went back out and I practised over and over and over again.

I chose to feel and then enquire.. 

What can I learn from this? 

Then I applied that learning, failed at something new, felt, learned, applied….

Now I can pretty much whip anyone’s ass at docking a yacht!

I forgave myself, I sat with myself, I held myself, I gave myself the compassion and the love to feel what I was feeling and then I got back up and got out there. 

This is my dearest wish for you, that through failure you're going to realise …

This whole thing that we have called our amazing lives,

is just one gigantic experimentation in failure. 

Let yourself fail in your relationships, try something new in your sex life and let yourself be clunky and hideous with it. 

WOW - I’ve mentioned in sex and money and sailing and whipping someones ass all in one blog. I think that's a record for me.

This could prove to be spectacular or just another spectacular failure. 

The point is get out there, experiment, try new things because this is what we're meant to be doing in this thing called life. 

Expand, grow, reach more people and with your failure have massive compassion, which will allow you to journey through it and come out the other side with the extraordinary exhilaration that comes from experiencing and learning something new. 

So, until next time, just keep it juicy and keep learning how to get your money and all your resources supporting you to live the richest, juiciest version of your life.

Big love 

Ann