"I have not failed, 

                   I’ve just found 10.000 ways that do not work"

                                                                                                                           -Thomas A. Edison

We all want to be good at something, we all want to succeed in what we do. From an early age onwards we are told that those who work hard will achieve what it is they work for. But we are rarely told that if we work hard we are also likely to fail (hard). And while failing may be painful and may sometimes even come as a surprise, failing is also what allows us to move forward and develop ourselves. And with holidays over and challenges surely awaiting us, we will be focusing on a feeling we’re all familiar with to one degree or another - fear of failure.

In discussing te dark side of wanting to succeed, we’ll cover things like the role played in fear of failure by modern social media, and how this role might be used for good, as well as why failure is better for us than we often realise. We’ll also discuss a great example of a safe environment to confront your fear of failure in, as well as how people often only tell us of their successes and not their misses. We’ll illustrate a great way to share your failures rather than your successes, for a change.

Here at the GEMH lab we’ve set ourselves a challenge this month, which is to share a failure every week (#FailFridays!) on social media, and we’d like you to join us by sharing your Fail of the Week with us (don’t forget to tag us @GEMH_lab and use the #FailFridays hashtag!). Sharing failures, we believe, is an important step towards acknowledging that failure is normal and even useful, and at the end of the month, we’ll recap all the failures we’ve suffered and survived, and discuss what we might learn from our own and others’ experience.

We hope you’ll recognise yourself in our stories, share your stories with us, and realise that failure is not a weakness but an opportunity for growth.