Bunny Young and a co-speaker argue that failure is temporary and necessary for growth, not a permanent identity. They share personal stories: Bunny's marital separation and failed business partnerships taught them crucial lessons about resilience and learning.
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So we get to talk about failing hard today and the rest of this month. So one of the things that kind of blows my mind is that as humans, we do everything possible to kind of avoid failing, when in all actuality, we wouldn't be here where we are today without failure. A lot of the world's greatest inventions were created out of failing at something else. I'm gonna steal some knowledge from one of my friends, April. She did a disrupt HR on failure and post it notes. Duct tape, penicillin, all were failures, but they ended up being better than what was the hope.
And I'm not saying go out there.
And actively fail, but I'm saying that.
When you do fail, don't beat yourself up about it. Like, you've got a ton of opportunity to learn from that and get better and do better the next time.
And so it's more of a mindset when somebody says, oh, I'm a failure. Well, congratulations, everybody's a failure. Introduce me to one person who has not failed, and I'm pretty sure there's a historical figure that one could argue never failed. But at the same time, that individual was here because of our fails as humans. And so everybody's a failure. And it's not. It's a temporary state of being. It's not a permanent state of being. So saying I failed is different than saying I'm a failure. So the next time you catch yourself saying I'm a failure, try turning that around to say I failed and then figure out how to succeed the next time. Because that's really the trick there. And the key is when you do fail is to figure out how to then succeed and get better and push yourself. And have you been able to. I couldn't do a push up for the longest time, I couldn't do a push up. And if you go to my Instagram stories, you probably see that I was trying to do a push up just yesterday, but I've worked really, really hard at it. And I didn't just give up and say, I'm never going to be able to do a push up. And if you own a business, you're going to fail. If you have children, you're going to fail as a parent. Like, newsflash, I'm sorry, spoiler alert. If you haven't already, which I'm pretty sure you have, you're going to fail. If you're in any kind of meaningful.
Relationship, you're going to fail. That's just what we do.
That's how we learn.
Think about trying to Learn how to walk. Did you just walk, like stand up and nail it? No, you fell on your face and it's cute as a baby. And there's people that are there to pick you up and hold you and say, you know, it's okay, you're eventually going to learn how to do it. Well, now that you're an adult, you need to do that for yourself instead of saying, I'm a failure and shutting down. The world needs you.
The world needs what's in between your ears. The world needs the passion that you have in your heart. The world needs what you're doing. And in order to bring that to the world, getting out of this two spaces, getting out of the space of fear of failure, right? So allowing that to prevent you from taking the first step and the second space is after you fail, getting into the cycle of woe is me and getting that mind cheese of, you know, being a failure. Like, that's not what you're here to do. You are here to fail, but you're here to continue doing what you're meant to do and to find success. There's ratios between the amount of failure and the amount of successes that you have. So if you've ever tried, ever failed, but if you've never tried, then you've never succeeded. I guarantee it. I mean, it's just simple facts in looking at how do we celebrate failure. And that's something that I'm going to bring April on later to later this month in another video to talk to us about how we can implement celebrating failure. But I want to know, what's your biggest failure?
This is what I want you to comment with. What is your biggest failure and what was the biggest lesson from that?
I have to say I'll tell you a couple of my most gigantic failures. My marriage failed really hard and I ended up separated from my husband for like 11 months and 20 something days. And we have the best relationship ever that we've ever had. I can't say ever, but that we've ever had today because of the failures that we went through as husband and wife and learning from all of those failures during the time that we were separated and, and continuing to learn and knowing that when we fail as husband or when we fail as wife, that it's not as simple as going down to the office and filing paperwork like where we live in the great state of Virginia. You can't do just throw an entire marriage away because of one failure. And as much as that frustrated me when I was in the moment of being Upset and wanting a divorce. Being able to give the time, like, intentional time to say, like, is this really what you want to just give up? There was a lot of, like, lessons there about what we do in business and what we do in life.
And I can tell you that I've rushed into business partnerships and they have failed hard. Because ultimately I was so focused on trying to get the success that I.
Ignored all the warning signs.
And the lesson that I learned there is that I'm very intentional and specific about my business partnerships now. And I really don't want to be in business partnerships if there's a way to achieve success with myself and being able to have the support. There's a difference between me needing a business partner and me needing additional accountability, additional resource, an additional knowledge base. And that doesn't always mean needing a business partner. And that was a huge lesson for me, but it came out of a gigantic failure, what some might call a cf.
So there's a ton of failure examples that I could give you. But the bottom line is, is that I want to know that you understand that there's lessons. So look back at your big, most organic failure. You don't have to share with me if it's something like I told you of a divorce or a miserable business partnership. But I want to know in the comments or just let me know through email or post in the Difference Makers group on Facebook, what's your biggest failure and what's your biggest lesson? Because here's the thing. Any coach that I've ever had is a master at failure. Any good coach that I've ever had is a master at failure. And they're there sharing their experiences and their failures so that I can avoid doing the same thing thing. Or when I do do the same thing, then I also have a solution on how to pull myself out without all of the mind cheese. So I have failed hard. I continue to fail hard. But I'm not a failure. You're not a failure. You make the world a better place. I appreciate you being here.
