You’ve probably heard this piece of advice hundreds of times…

“If you want to succeed in the long term, you need to be willing to fail in the short term.”

Makes sense, right?

And yet, even the thought of failing can completely freak us out. It can be really hard to disconnect the PROCESS of failure (“failure leads to success”) from the IDENTITY of failure (“I’m a loser”).

Maybe we need a better way to think about the failure/success model. One that isn’t so closely tied to our self-concept.

What if instead of trying to “fail our way to success,” we focused on learning how to “safely fall so we can get right back up”?

In Shaun White: The Last Run, we get to watch one the best snowboarders of all time as he prepares for the 2022 Olympics. The stakes are high. Any misstep could not only lose him Olympic gold—it could also lead to serious injury.

To reduce that risk, Shaun doesn’t just practice doing each trick correctly. He also practices FALLING correctly—landing safely in a giant airbag after every attempt.

Hundreds of reps, over and over again, dialing in the muscle memory needed to land the trick when everything works according to plan, AND to fall more safely when the plan goes to crap.

What if you were to apply the same approach to problem solving? Instead of struggling to let go of your fear of failure, you could use business challenges as opportunities to practice falling safely.

You practice solving problems every day, not just to reach a specific goal, but to get comfortable with the fact that even your “best” ideas won’t always work out the way you hope.

Just like Shaun White, you hurl yourself through the air, knowing that you’ll either nail the trick (solve the problem), or completely whiff (not solve the problem).

Either way, you know deep down that you’re always safe. When you fall, you just slide off that air bag and head right back up the hill to try again.

No broken bones or trip to the hospital—just a slightly bruised ego.

What will you do today to get better at falling so that you can get right back up?

Will you consider that the pain of failure may not actually exist anywhere but in your own mind?