Failure is Completely Necessary for Growth

Jim Donovan drumming with Carlos Santana 1997, you can see my stressed out face over Carlos' shoulder on the drum kit...
Some of you may have heard that story.. If not I'll tell you sometime...


Failure

Failure is completely necessary for growth. Not wanting to try new things is often related to fear of failure. If you are unwilling to fail, you are unwilling to progress- to grow past your current path. Failure hurts. It hurts at a profound level at your deepest core, and when it hurts you that deeply, it means that you are experiencing something in a full way- in a way that's real and not peripheral.

For example; when you are fully in love with someone you may feel an all encompassing, even overwhelming, emotion. Feeling like this on even just one occasion, you crave it- the fullness of it, the warmth and joy of it. It makes you feel *alive*. In a similar way, when you fail, even though it is painful experience, if you can consider the failure as a necessary step in growth, the failure can also bring us a fuller feeling of aliveness and eventual growth.

You can free yourself from the fear of failure if you understand that it is vital for your growth. The tricky part, is that experiencing a failure can be painful- and it can cause you to go to great lengths to make sure that the "failure" never happens again. On the other hand, you could also get inspired to overcome the challenge that the failure presents.

Anytime you allow yourself to experience emotion to its fullest extent, you feel truly alive. It's the expression of emotion that is the key to our power.