The sense of having the guts to fail

What would you do if you knew you would fail?

I think that there are very few people who are now jumping on top of a table to shout something out like: YES ALL NOW!

Because I recently created a workshop with the title « Guts & Sense », I started to deep dive more into making mistakes and taking risks. With our need for certainty & safety not the first step to take, is it?

What is « Guts » and what is « Sense » and how do they relate?

Are you naturally born as the One with Guts or as a Funk? Some wonderful English words charged with some additional meaning. The Courageous One has guts / courage / strength, but can also be seen as reckless and irresponsible, like the thrill-seeker. Maybe even a bit of a « obnoxious little kid ».
And then the Funk, who dares and does nothing, thinks for a long time about which decisions to make, procrastinates and reasons a lot for not doing something. And is a bit of a watchman from whom you don’t have to expect much in this moment. Who also wriggles out and disappears. Without you noticing.

Guts; the courage & dare to do something without having the certainty that things will turn out well

Or the certainty that someone will take care of you if things go wrong. In this description there is room for failure and mistakes. And so learning & development. Imagine that we would not have had the guts to learn to walk and talk, then we would all crawl now and make strange noises.

Sense; the ability ability to understand, recognize, value, or react to something, especially any of the five physical abilities to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel that something has or brings in a larger holistic context (or something like this)?

The meaning of Guts is easy and well-arranged in the Cambridge Dictionary. If you look up “Sense” then we quickly have a five-headed dragon. In English that is. Make sense?

And here comes the crux

As a trainer, as a person, we make mistakes. And so I assumed that in the Guts & Sense Module, the group would be directly on the same path of understanding; but nothing was less true. It touched some people personally; as if they had to follow this training because they no longer had any sense of it all. The training completely took on a different character.

So it took Guts to switch and flip it with the group and to give a new « meaning » to the whole day. We did that. With a great outcome.

We fail, we learn.

How beautiful it is when we no longer think in terms of success and failure, but in getting results and outcomes only. Whether it is positive or negative, direct or indirect.

Guts and Sense are two great ingredients for learning as a process. This failure particularly resulted in a wonderful workshop that again serves many people to take courageous next steps. Failing never made more sense than this!