When Overachievers Fail
I recently “auditioned” to be a facilitator for the Coaches Training Institute’s Leadership program. It’s an amazing transformative year-long program with three week’s of intensive personal awareness processing, ropes courses, and making of new friends from around the world. (This is the program where I birthed the zAmya Theater Project!) There were over 350 people that applied and I made it to the final 25 candidates. I felt good about that. The audition consisted of two-days with 24 other candidates leading ourselves in activities and learning. To say the least, collaborating and competing at the same time was intense. All the people were beautiful people that want more for our world. Well, as you can probably tell by the title, I didn’t make the cut. I’ve done a lot of processing about this and two things have come up for me. (Ok, there are a lot of other ones, but I’ll just focus on these two. ☺)One – focusing on what you learn as you go after your goals/dreams, is probably just as important as achieving them.Two – if you point yourself in the direction of your dreams and desires, you can’t go entirely wrong, it just might not look like what you had planned.The combination of these two leads to a more full experience of life and well…maybe…overachieving from failure? ☺ We’ve all failed at things in our personal and professional life, but what do we consciously learn from them? Do we take time to reflect, to see the gems, and all that it took for us to go for it in the first place?Here are some reflection questions I offer to those of you who have failed at something:
What was it I really wanted to achieve? What really was my goal, or dream?
What are the multiple ways to measure “success?”
How did I in some ways achieve success?
What did I learn that I never anticipated?
What is available in the present, the “in-between space,” after the failure and before I continue to move toward my goal/dream?
What, if anything, has shifted or changed about my goal based on the result of this attempt?
What do I want to commend myself for in the pursuit of this goal/dream?
What questions would you add? Please post them!And for those of you intrigued, here is a link to the Overachievers web series I’m in! ☺ www.overachieverswebseries.com