267: Brave Creative Humans: Failure (Part 1)
- Diana Varma
- Sep 11
- 2 min read
Failure: friend or foe?
One of my very favourite exercises I use to help others summon their creative confidence is a sensory exercise around failure and it’s the first step in decoupling our identity with the idea of failure.
My thinking is that if we can sense failure’s presence when we’re experiencing it, we can begin to recognize its pattern; that it’s a feeling that comes and goes, but ultimately doesn’t have to be entangled with our identity and that by the very nature of being a brave creative human, doing brave creative work, we must be open to the idea of failure because trying new things isn’t always going to work out. And that’s not a bad thing. Once we get comfortable being uncomfortable and letting failure walk alongside us in our creative journeys, this paves the way to go one step further and make friends with failure, actively inviting it into the creative process, which is a truly liberating experience.
In this first of two episodes about failure, I asked our brave creative humans “How do you sense failure: literally, how would you describe how you see it, feel it, hear it, smell it and even taste it?”. Let’s listen in…
Hot, cold, heavy, sharp, loud, dark, painful, exciting, invisible, cloudy, a pit in your stomach, rotten, a gut feeling, alarm bells.
The sensation of failure is a deeply nuanced and deeply individualized experience, and however it is that you feel it, you are a brave creative human.
Next time, Allison, Kevin, Vincent, Meg, Emad, and Justine Abigail share personal stories of times they’ve failed that are both deeply vulnerable and highly relatable.
Stay tuned…
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Music:
Just Havin’ a Beatbox - John Bartmann licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License
Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle
