Learn to fall so you can get up again

Small children do this to perfection when they learn to walk. They fall, they cry, they get up, they smile. They don’t care if they fall and they try again. They celebrate their success, their growth. Their goal is to walk, not to fall. And so they learn to fall in order to be able to get up again. Remember those looks of determination and surprise and sometimes even smiles when they’ve landed on their bum again?

Sometime while we were growing up, we forgot and unlearned this concept of falling gracefully. Falling become akin to failure and it became tainted with negative connotations. I failed English, I failed maths, I failed finance. I worked my muscles to failure at the gym on that last set. Oh, hold on, that was actually a success. Or was it?

Failing means a lack of success or the neglect or omission of expected or required action. So if it’s a lack of success, then why work towards failure at the gym? And if it is the omission of an expected outcome like at school, university or work, who decided on what the expectation is? It is hard to live up to someone else’s expectations. Falling is something we do in the course of life as we learn, grow and find our way.

Learning to fall again is difficult. It means separating self-esteem from self-confidence; acknowledging that we are not perfect and need to keep on learning; finding your own way of doing things, because that will work for you; and finding a motivation that is intrinsic, one that is worth getting up for again. It means being able to show vulnerability and fallibility. If you are not ready to fall (or learn how to fall again), how will you be able to grow?

When children learn to walk and explore the world, there is no fear, no judgement, just curiosity and an innate trust that someone will be there to catch and to help them get back up again. When I learned to climb, I had to learn to fall again – literally. It was excruciating initially. There was fear - of getting hurt, because at that age, I had learned that there are consequences to falls (oh, the beauty of innocence); judgement – what would the others think of me, everyone is so much better than me, I have no reason to be on the wall, what if I do this incorrectly? And trust – will the holds hold, will the rope? Will my belayer watch and catch me in time?

And so I learned to fall again. I found someone I could trust to not judge me, someone who showed me how to fall safely as yes, there is a technique, someone who took my fears and concerns of getting hurt seriously and helped me put them in perspective, someone who held onto the rope for as long I needed to find my own success on the wall. I also learned that the only way up is to accept that I will fall on occasion. And I am not the only one, others around me fall as well. The really good ones fall often.

If you want to learn to fall again so that you can get up to accomplish what you have the potential to achieve, connect with me - I look forward to being your ‘someone’.