When was the last time you heard something like, “Hey, that was awesome, you failed so amazingly!” My guess is: never.

Most of us aren’t strangers to hearing advice on how to succeed, having heard those key success words since we were young, like ‘hard work’ and ‘determination’. Who doesn’t want to be successful? I mean, it feels so good (and it looks good too).

A few months back, however, I heard someone talking on the radio about failing well. This intrigued me, since failing is one of those things that I often feel terribly about and then sweep under the rug (though the experience heavily clings to me forever more, like cold, wet jeans). I often attempt to control my environment in every way possible just so that I can have the outcome I most desire and, heaven forbid, not fail.

A few weeks ago, my ten-year-old son hopped into the van after school, and though I normally receive one-word answers when asking him about his day, he excitedly announced that the talent show tryouts were coming up. Talent show? We are a family of broad pursuits such as team sports and hiking, but specific talents such as juggling, magic tricks or dancing just don’t exist in our household.

Tentatively, I asked him, “Oh? And do you have a buddy trying out?”

“Well, I was thinking I’d do a bottle flip. You know that YouTube video where a guy comes out onto the stage, does one bottle flip and then walks off? Everybody in the audience started cheering and laughing as soon as he was done. It’s hilarious.”

“Um, no, I don’t know that one.” Hear him out.

“Well pretty much everyone at my school would know the video and my friends and I thought it would be funny for me to do. I just have to do one flip.”

I drive away from the school while two voices sound off in my head:

Welcome Fear: Oh sure, his buddies think it would be funny but they’re not the ones who are going to possibly FAIL. What are you doing nodding to him in the rearview mirror and being all calm-like? If you really love him, you’ll stop him! You’re his protector!

And welcome my (often suppressed due to certain emotions) Wisdom: Yes, you do really love him and that means supporting him to take risks.

I take a deep breath. “Sooo it would be what, a fifty-fifty chance of you making the flip?”

“Yup,” he says matter-of-factly, with a casual smile on his face.

Fear: Look at him right now. He has no clue what that crappy part of the fifty percent could mean. He’s still so young and innocent!

Wisdom: Which is exactly why he needs to try.

Fear: And what might the teachers think when they see it? What if they don’t see it as talent but instead, mocking the event? What if no one has seen the YouTube video and no one laughs? What if…

Fear is like that. He impulsively hurls himself into the non-existent future and anxiously spews every possible what-if, some justified, most not. I (reluctantly) chose to ignore him.

“Well you need to be prepared that if you don’t make it, it’s okay,” I said. He nodded. “I guess you’d better start practicing.”

And that he did. He had already been bottle flipping quite a bit (my son’s friend [red vest], has even created a YouTube video of the two of them bottle flipping), and on many days and nights, we could hear the bang… bang… bang… of the water-filled bottles as they landed or fell.

Life got busy as it usually does and he mentioned the tryouts were coming. And then one evening, as we were prepping dinner, he said to my husband and I, “So I’ve been kind of holding in telling you guys about the talent show tryouts that happened today.”

My heart stopped. What an idiot I am! He had told me the previous day, but I had forgotten to ask. Immediately, I knew it hadn’t gone well or he would have told us about it earlier. And then, the thing I had feared seeing most: I looked at his little round face and saw that tears were teetering on his eyelids.

Where was the pause button? Or better yet, the reverse button? A host of my life failures raced back to me in a split second, quickly passing shadows that still lurked within: failing many daycare days or friends’ sleepovers due to severe separation anxiety; the failed class election in grade 6; the races I didn’t win; the boys who never liked me back; the job interviews I horribly messed up on; the many literary publishers’ and agents’ rejections. My first instinct was to protect my son from all of those.

I told you this would happen! screamed Fear.

Oh shut up, not now! I say, and then tell myself: It’s okay, I’m prepared for this. So he didn’t make the tryouts. In fact, I’m kind of relieved, better that than failing at the actual show.

“What happened, buddy?” my husband asked.

Taking a breath to hold it to together, he explained that he stood in line at the recess break, but didn’t get the chance to do it as there was a long lineup of kids. Then, he raced to the designated room as soon as the lunch bell went and he was one of the first kids in yet another long lineup, mostly of grade sevens.

“They only gave me a small stool to do it on,” he lamented, “so I got really nervous. And then I did the flip and it landed on the edge, almost stayed, but then fell. Everyone started laughing.”

I instantly had this vision of a group of preteens, at least five times larger than my son (of course) towering over him and pointing their fingers while they laughed in slow motion.

“Did you cry?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

“Yes,” he whispered. And with that, his tears lost their grip on the tenuous cliff edge from which they clung and tumbled down his soft cheeks. As parents, we’re so vulnerable to failures through our children: their first skinned knees; their artwork that they worked so damn hard on that didn’t make the cut; their retelling of how they wandered around, alone, over the lunch break at school because they had no one to play with… it all just hurts.

Me, hugging him: “It’s okay, you tried.” My husband (who, like most men, is conditioned to deter their sons from crying in public, but did really well with this one): “Yeah, it’s okay, the kids probably weren’t laughing at you.” Me: Yes, maybe they were laughing because they were uncomfortable. My husband: Not that you made them feel uncomfortable. Me: Right, yes, not that you would have.

We went on like two squawking crows, back and forth, trying to ease his (and our) discomfort. Maybe if we just kept saying things, anything, something would resonate with him and make him feel better.

(If our wise, sensitive fourteen-year-old daughter were there, she would have been chiming in too, often with more useful words than my husband and I could ever offer.)

At last, amongst our vomiting parental blather, I said, “You know how I was talking to you about that woman who wrote about the importance of allowing ourselves to take risks and be vulnerable?” (yup, Brené Brown, as per my last blog). He nodded. “Well, she said that we hate to be vulnerable, but we love to see it in others.”

His face brightened and he looked up at us. “That’s true!” he half shouted. “My friends all gathered around me and told me it was okay. They were really nice to me after that.”

“That’s because your failure told them that their own failures are okay. It connected them to you in a very human way.” He sat thinking about this and my husband and I eagerly waited for his response.

“Hey!” he said.

“What?” both my husband and I chimed.

“You know that Pokémon card I got the other day? I looked it up and it’s worth fifteen dollars!” He then got up and went to his room to organize his cards. Just like that, he made it through another *failure. I took a moment to celebrate that my son just became that much more resilient to life’s unexpected outcomes. We can’t always control those outcomes, but we can choose how we respond to them.

After he went to bed that night, my husband and I had our therapy session with one another, dusting each other off after the fall, knowing full well that we took it harder than he had.

About a week later, as I continued to ponder how to fail well, I serendipitously came across *Pema Chodron’s speech that she gave at her granddaughter’s university commencement ceremony regarding failure. She stated a quotation by Samuel Beckett: “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.” Further to this, she stated:

We think of failure as something that happens to us. We either blame it on somebody else or some other organization — our boss, our partner, whatever. Sometimes you experience it as heartbreak or disappointment. Sometimes it’s rage. But failure or things not working out doesn’t feel good. At that time, maybe instead of doing the habitual thing of labeling yourself a failure or a loser, you could get curious about what’s going on.

I think part of failing well comes from separating ourselves from our failures. Perhaps the experience of failing becomes more digestible if we acknowledge that even though we failed (verb), that doesn’t make us failures (noun).

So being the idealist I am, I’ve tried imagining a world where we could all let go of control, dive into new adventures, take risks, and follow our hearts without fearing failure; a world where we could give someone a high five and say, “Hey, that was awesome, you failed so amazingly!”.

My goal in our household, therefore, is to nurture this mindset. The perfect opportunity came when I asked my son if it was okay that I blog about his bottle flipping experience because he failed so well—he shone with pride and wholeheartedly agreed.

_______

*Note 1: I know I’ve been on a kick with Pema Chodron and Brené Brown as I’ve been reading their work recently and my reading sometimes triggers what I’d like to write about (and their work has undoubtedly resonated with me). I’m currently reading other books, so I’m sure it will shift again soon!

*Note 2: I acknowledge that our definitions of failure may be different. I tell my kids that if they gain learning from an experience—and therefore grow because of it—it’s not really a failure; however, that may not be realistic for the society we live in, so I’m okay espousing the word ‘fail’.