We recently had snow in western KY and middle TN and my family and I had a crazy adventure with the snow and travelling though it!
You see we were in Florida and it snowed in Nashville, where we would be flying back to to get to Kentucky. Confidently we decided to drive home thinking that by the time we arrived in Tennessee, the snow would be melted. How wrong we were!
We made it to Chattanooga around dark so we stayed in a hotel for the night and woke up bright and early to start again. We headed out only to realize the most direct way was closed due to the snow. So… we headed south and thought we could bypass the worst weather. After driving in a circle for more than 8 hours and not being able to reach any cleared roads, we tucked our tails and drove back to the same hotel!
The NEXT morning, 48 hours after we’d left Florida, we were able to make the drive into Nashville.
It was stressful and frightening, and downright depressing!
BUT…Here’s what was so awesome about this. We got comfortable with failing. We couldn’t make it to our destination. We tried and tried. We got creative, we tried to make the best of it. We went through low moments, but we got through it! We made it home! Safely. It was fine.
So I started really looking at the opportunities in my life for failing. I think about the professional athletes whose whole game depends on their shot, or their kick, and sometimes they miss. They fail. They lose. But they have to come back the next night, or next week and try again. They have to have a short memory. They have to be comfortable failing. Because when we fail, we get better. We take what we’ve learned and apply it and get BETTER.
My daughter was recently applying for a BIG scholarship. By big, I mean she had to read a book, multiple papers and write 3 essays, and answer a number of questions. In typical teenager style, she had procrastinated on this.so as the deadline approached, she started to panic. Me too. I mean, she had plenty of time, but now it was looking as if she’d miss the deadline. She had other work piling up, practices, work. My instinct, as a mom, was to step in and do it. Or to nag her until she did. But it had to be her lesson, her failure. Because what will she learn if I rescue her every single time? She’ll learn there are no consequences. And consequences are a GOOD thing! Accountability is a good thing. Not just to doing what she said she would do, but accountability to herself. A lesson she can use her whole life, in school, at work, in every relationship she has.
She did it. She finished. And she got all the glory. Not me. I didn’t do anything. I gently encouraged her, reminded her. But because she did ALL the work, ALL by herself, she gets all the glory. If she gets the scholarship, it means more because it’s truly HERS, not mom’s, not dad’s. She got to decide.
As a parent, it’s important for me to let my kids decide their own accountability their own consequences. It’s the same as an employer, or as a dentist. I share my findings, my opinion with my patients, but at the end of the day they must HOLD themselves accountable for their own health. I’m just a partner in that.
I tell my kids all the time, their happiness is their own responsibility. Not mine, not their dad’s. No their friends or their boyfriends or your mom’s or your spouses. Yours and yours alone. You decide. You choose. Get comfortable with failure. Because the more you try, the more you’ll fail, but the more you’ll succeed too, and that’s where you’ll find your true joy.
When I started my practice from scratch, yes zero patients. I learned to get comfortable failing, and fail faster. I heard that term recently . Fail faster. How do you do that? You stretch, push, pull. When my husband and I taught our kids how to snow ski, we would say “you aren’t getting better unless you’re falling.” What does that mean? It taught them to push harder, go faster, really see how they would perform on new terrain, different obstacles, trying sharper turns or steeper descents. It taught them that falling, failing is ok, even good.
So what can you learn from it? The worst thing you can imagine is probably not going to happen. So if everything goes bad, maybe it is catastrophic, but what are those chances? It probably isn’t likely. Are you making decisions based on your skill set, your knowledge base, the opinion of your mentors? If you are, things are likely to go well. You never hear any great stories of people who did everything right! The best, most inspiring stories are those of overcoming obstacles.