I sat in a meeting recently where someone was talking out a shortcoming that they had had, and how they had been beating themself up over it when another colleague in the room stated something to the tune of, “you can’t learn from your failure if you’re busy beating yourself up from it”. I instantly felt like a lightbulb had gone off and muttered out loud to no one in particular “that would make a great blog post.”

My social media newsfeed is constantly filled with running related efforts with a few sprinkles of non-running related things (because I basically only follow runners 😂), and there are many people I follow who I admire not because of their constant success, but because of their abilities to strategically analyze what went wrong when they failed so they can learn from it for next time. I always aspire to do that too, though I’m not as skilled as some others are quite yet at it.

I have never beat myself up for missing a target in my running goals. I have, however, always analyzed what was a success and what went wrong because I constantly want to learn from myself. I have learned through many years of analyzing my half marathon PR attempt crash and burns things like if I don’t take in electrolytes before mile 10 I’m going to have a bad race, that I have to be very conscious of the humidity of whatever race I’m doing and plan for my socks and feet swelling accordingly, that there is a certain length of shorts and capris that are acceptable for running and anything shorter or longer will sabotage me, and that I’m notorious for going out too fast and regretting it.

Do you know why I know these things? Because I have taken my failures as opportunity to learn so I can succeed the next time.

If I spent the amount of time being cruel to myself that I now spend really analyzing my successes and my shortcomings every time I miss my target, I would be miserable! I have failed constantly- some times more than others, and in much larger ways than other times. I also have learned that because I am not beating myself up over my failure, I find myself more willing to put myself out there for bigger, scarier and other goals that don’t feel attainable because I know I can take every opportunity as a time to learn, whether success is at the end of the goal or not.

I hope you aren’t spending too much time beating yourself up over shortcomings. You’re awesome and deserve to celebrate as such.

Cheers to success AND to failure,

Vanessa