Camden Imagines Participant Blogs
If we acknowledge and name our failures we have the ability to improve
Camden Imagines: How we learned to celebrate failure — by Elita Johns
This blog is part of a series written by the participants of the Camden Imagines programme. This eight week training introduced council officers and public servants to the skills of collective imagination and horizontal leadership to empower them to become agents of change in the borough.
Elita is a Digital IQ Development Officer in Digital & Data Services who leads on Camden’s Induction programme, intranet publishers network and maximising the use of your laptop. In this blog she explains how on the Camden Imagines programme she learnt to see failures in a different light.
“If you never know failure, you will never know success” — Sugar Ray Leonard
During week five of the Imagination Activism course we learned how to befriend failure.
We are conditioned to fear failure from an early age. We are taught that failure is ‘bad’ and ‘success’ is good.
Do you remember when as a child you would balance on a wall just to prove you could do it? And then what happened? You would fall and scrape your knees which would bleed, hurt, scab over and heal. What did you learn from balancing and falling? That sometimes things don’t quite go to plan and you need to pick yourself up and learn from whatever went wrong.
What did you do next time you wanted to balance on the wall? You probably approached the balancing with greater care, taking notice of how you were balancing and trying to improve the skill because you had fallen before and did not want to hurt yourself again!
During the week we were asked to journal 10 failures that had occurred in our lives. Any small failure. For example:
- Not doing the washing up after dinner and finding dirty plates and cutlery in the sink the next morning — and having to wash them up even though you had a tight morning schedule
- Forgetting to call your friend back as promised as you were too busy
- Not going running because it was raining and then feeling annoyed at yourself
- Not paying the person who worked hard on the garden on time because you had too much to do and ‘forgot’ to make the bank transfer
It became apparent that our failures tended to have a theme, so for the examples I give above the general theme was failing to act on things that were important but not having the time to do so.
The following week we connected with another person and discussed the items on our lists. It was interesting to hear how the person listening to you chat about your own failures saw them in a different light and praised how you had dealt with a situation.
If we brush our failures under the carpet and try to pretend they do not exist, our behaviours will remain the same. If we acknowledge and name our failures we have the ability to improve. As someone in the group observed “a failure is a chance to do better next time”.
Why not try this exercise to see what you come up with, and more importantly — is there a theme and did you discover what you can do to turn your failure into a success?
This blog is part of a series written by Camden’s Imagination Activists as part of their Imagination Activism programme called “Camden Imagines”. To read the other blogposts in the series, please visit this link.
