Up and down the country parents are dealing with consoling their children who have just received their GCSE results today. There’s going to be some very happy households too. Many kids will have made their grades and will be able to put their plan A into place.
But for the kids that were like me at 16 it will feel like a lonely experience. Embarrassing too. Friends, cousins and jubilated kids on the news waving their bit of paper in the air all seemed to do better than me. I felt like a failure.
I even remember what I wore that day. It was my grunge stage at 16. Long hair, ripped jeans and an orange REM t-shirt from the Monster album. Grunge symbolised the anger, frustration and angst of those years. Listening to bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden became much more appealing than revising for exams.
I will never know how those exam results changed my life. Not really. I never felt like I wanted to go to University, so top grades never appealed to me anyway. The problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted to do at 16.
But what I do know now is that those results didn’t define me. I thought they did at the time. And it used to annoy me that If I were to fill out a job application form it would ask for my GCSE results. 27 years later, is my knowledge of GCSE algebra of any importance to any potential employer? My knowledge of algebra does not define me!
I didn’t know it then, but I learnt a great lesson that day. I learnt how to deal with disappointment. And not just the sort of disappointment you get when you open up the takeaway bag to find that they’ve missed out the salt and pepper spare ribs, as crushing as that is. No. The disappointment that you feel when you don’t even want to be on the planet anymore. You don’t know why you exist.
And looking back throughout my life I managed to discover lots of failures. I fail often. Only now, I absolutely love it!
Due to knowledge, experience, a good track record and plenty of recommendations I seemed to have stumbled into becoming a weight management specialist within my coaching. And I call it weight management because as much as the large percentage of people want to lose weight, I also work with those who need to gain weight. So specialising in weight loss wouldn’t do what I do any justice.
What I find is that many people go through the same emotions as I have. Not so much in them having the same experiences, but in how they feel about themselves after failure. Not hitting a weight target, not managing to complete an exercise routine or feeling like they’ve eaten too much or too little. Anxiety and resentment can take over.
But over time I’ve managed a lightbulb moment that has armed me with the most valuable tool. I now know that failure is not the opposite of success, it is a part of it. To succeed at anything, we must accept that we fail sometimes. That’s why I love it. Failure, to me now, is a milestone moment. If I know how it went wrong, tomorrow I will know how to put it right.
You will not have success every day, whatever your goals. It will hurt. I know it will. And the good news is that whatever your journey might be, it won’t be as bad as learning algebra.
Never Give Up PT 