hello.

i understand the fear of failure. been there. done that. both the fear and the failure. we are all afraid of falling flat on our face, especially if people are watching. have you ever seen someone trip and fall in public, and although you peek to make sure they aren’t hurt, you mostly try to avoid looking in their direction at all? you know how embarrassing it is to fall in public and you’d like to ease their embarrassment just a little if you can. maybe you’ve had to have had moments when you yourself have tripped, or wiped-out on ice, or, in my case, walked straight into a parking meter, to feel that level of empathy for the person.

the thing is, we all stumble in some way. we all have our moments of falling flat on our face, or being winded by a parking meter that we didn’t notice. we just need to right ourselves, take a deep breath (not so easy when you are winded btw) and move on.

there are all sorts of articles on the topic of failure and success from much more successful and inspiring people than myself (google for a few), but i’ve learned through various stumbles that the hardest thing to do is the initial self pick-up. it’s tough. sometimes you want to crawl into a corner and pretend it never happened. but trust me, once you just get to your feet, that first step moving forward is pretty easy. and, once you’ve fallen a few times, you no longer even think twice about picking yourself up – you just do it. in fact, you can end up laughing about it as you do so.

failure is another step towards success. maybe once you accept it as just that, it makes it easier to take those leaps, to run straight ahead, to not look down. yeah, you might trip and fall, but so what? you can always get right back up.

and, if that doesn’t help, you can always visit failblog.org and have a good laugh.