Tuesday 18th December 2018 - Learning from "failure"

Posted 1:50pm

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” - Denis Waitley

“Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing.” - J.K. Rowling

I am not sure I like the word "failure" - for me, things can work out as you want, or they may not. And if that happens, it is then our strength and belief to continue that makes us stronger.

HMHB has gone through some amazing progression over the last couple of years, but we have also had our downs to accompany the ups. When we ran our first ever Ajani, despite its undoubted success, we realised we needed to make changes to the length of the course as well as the content. We adapted this for our second Ajani, and learnt even more about ourselves and or service users. The fact we have only run four programmes in two years has not been down to any lack of effort. Many may have given up. We have persevered, and we believe that 2019 will really bring us forward. Feedback is extraordinary. We feel we will be given the opportunity to show what we can do.

However, there have been quite a few "what's the point?" moments in that time. Great meetings, followed by weeks of silence. Incredible preparation undermined by a lack of effort from some organisations to assist us. But we have not given up.

This crosses over into personal life too. This whole venture has been developed following mental health issues suffered by others, and this will occasionally rear its ugly head again. Lack of funds can also lead to stress and anxiety.

But, like we explain re a growth mind-set, we embraced many of these obstacles as a challenge. That is what we all need to do around "failure". See it as just a step back, and instead of giving up, we look to see how we can make two steps forward to counteract.

We are all human. We will all make mistakes. We all have feelings and dreams. But we can also all do amazing things, reach targets and goals, and achieve greatness. Failure is just a part of that journey.