Falling With Style

It's happened. Yet again, it's happened. This is the third time in our house, now.

Our newest child - one who comes with all the latest mod-cons - has taken his first steps. In fact, in motor vehicle terms he has gone from 0-60 in a matter of days. It's incredible to watch. Have you ever been in on the process? It's fascinating to analyse it.

First - there's the twinkle in the eye. Next comes the rolling over onto the tummy, and a giggle. Then within days, that rolling has turned into commando-crawling, elbows doing the work. SAS eat your heart out. Actually, don't. That would be gross.

Then the crawling turns into wild arm waving (picture the little one at a JLS concert) and then grabbing nearest furniture legs / human legs / dishwasher door* (*or all at the same time in a bid for an Octopus impression).

Then one day it happens.

It warrants a phone call from the wife and a whole album of pictures on the iPhone and accompanying commentary on Facebook. Then sit back and watch the world 'Like' 'Like' 'Like' 'Like'.... He takes his first Big Steps on his Own. And the accomplishment is known as a resounding success. Grade A* young lad. Superb effort.

But from thereon a mystifying shift takes place. Once those first steps are proven, it seems society at large starts measuring things by outcome, rather than process. All the time our dear little Toby is struggling, grabbing, falling with style, inconveniencing, reaching out, tumbling, failing, disturbing, trying, disrupting ...in a bid to show the world he can walk on his own two (cute) (small) (dinky) feet, it's okay. We expect that.

But flash forward in time and somehow once the First Steps and First Words are boxes ticked, and one reaches the 'teenage' years ('the in-between-agers') or even Big Grown Ups in the odd-world called Business - any behaviour that appears to warrant descriptions of 'Struggling' or 'Failing' is bang out of order. How dare you Struggle! Failing Is Shameful. Struggling Is For Wimps. I can see the t-shirt slogans now.

Bang Bang you're out.  As-if we should get it right first time? Or second time at least? 'Expectations are the greatest source of unhappiness' says Neale Donald Walsch. How come we expect to get everything right. All the time? When did we decide that? Who says that's how it must stay? We do it as parents. We do it in business. We do it in our own gorgeous heads. Berating, Blaming, Banging our heads against the fridge door. First Time or else.

If Love is Patient, Love is Kind then - to quote that celebrity sage Will.I.Am and his Black Eyed Peas crew, Where is the Love? Is Love only for those two and under?

When did Process become a dirty word? It's all grades, results, performance, outcomes. Which is fine, really - I run marathons and the outcome always matters to me... And what about all the struggling, grabbing, reaching out, disturbing, failing that goes into getting the result? Marathon running taught me that process matters.

Last time I looked nobody was born with a magic wand in their hand. Not even Harry Potter.

"Success is going from failure to failure without losing hope" suggested Winston Churchill.

So to all those of us who are still carrying L-plates in our lives - as parents, partners, colleagues, leaders, friends. Keep On. If you're down, get back up again. If you failed, its just handy information about how not to do something. You're not a failure. You're a resilient learner. You may not remember your first steps, but that same resilience is within you. Always. Right now it's there.

And, well done Toby for a majestic effort. Effort is what we should praise more than Right Answers (thank you Dr.Carol Dweck for that reminder). For falling and getting back up again, even off the tarmac with your pink and grazed knees. Life, sadly, will have you grazing your knees again my littl'un, but I hope that at the wise young age of one you hold onto the truth you have earned that the Struggle is all part of the Journey. Ask any caterpillar.

The F-Word

Roger Bannister. What a man, and what a failure.

We know him for his lung-busting 3 minutes 59.4 seconds of running on the Iffley Road athletics track on that breezy May day in 1954. The celebrated finish line moment caught on camera, his chin aloft, shoulders back, trackside timekeepers with fingers on clocks.

And there is a lesser known part to Roger’s story, before this great F-is-for-Finishing moment.

Two years previous to becoming the first ever known man in the world to run a whole mile in under four minutes, Roger was dealing with another F-word. F-is-for-Failure.

It was such a monumental let down, in his eyes, that it caused him to seriously contemplate hanging up his running shoes for good. He wanted to call it a day. “I came, I ran, I missed out”. Hardly a speech to rouse the troops.

Before the two year intense battle to run the first ever ‘sub-4 minute mile’, a battle between Roger and his two rivals – Wes Santee of the U.S. and John Landy from Down-Under - there was the small matter of the Olympic Games in Helsinki.

Even five decades ago the press were well versed in hype-over-hope and supercharging expectations. But when it came to it, however much the British press had all but guaranteed Roger the gold medal in the 1,500 metres, Roger didn’t deliver. He finished in the worst place possible. F-is-for-Fourth. He was crucified in the press.

Demoralised, defeated, down trodden. “I can’t do this anymore” were the words ringing in Roger’s mind. He had given years of his life to intensive early morning sprint training alongside the rigorous demands of training as a medical doctor in Oxford. He had other aspirations he could pursue.

But he did ‘do it anymore’.

The Japanese have a saying, ‘Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight.’

On the verge of hanging up his running spikes, Roger made a decision. A decision he had no way of knowing would be a landmark in history. A decision when His-Story became History.

We rarely get the privilege in advance of knowing that our brave decisions to Stand Up Again when we have Fallen, will yield our desired result. Perhaps it’s a matter of F-is-for-Faith.

As the apostle Paul once said, ‘We walk by faith, not by sight.’ Most of the time we have to live with the ‘sight’ in our heads of the dream we are working towards, before we see it materialise.

We’ve all Fallen. We’ve all Failed. We’ve all lacked Faith at times. It’s human and normal.

And what happens next is a choice. “Fall Down Seven Times…”

What if there is no such thing as failure? Only feedback. What if failure is just information on how to not do something?

Seb Coe, another running-hero of mine, once said ‘The paradox of excellence is built on the necessity of failure.’ That’s right, the necessity of it. However much we may not like the taste of failure, it can – if we embrace it – give us something firm to build on. F-is-for-Foundations.

Not many of us will break a world record or be the first person to achieve such and such. But our choices become part of our History, and our failures can become a rich part of our Story.

We have all failed. And we are not failures. Perhaps we are all just finding our way to run our race a little better.

Chin up, shoulders back, keep running…