Have you ever had one of those days (or weeks, or months) where you just feel stuck? What do I mean by stuck? That feeling that you are not making progress. That you are doing the same thing over and over and nothing is changing. Solving the same problem time after time and knowing that tomorrow you will probably be solving the same problems again. That feeling that you are working really hard but not really achieving anything.

If you do feel that way, I'm going to let you in on a secret - it's not just you. Unless you have talked openly to others about this (and how many of us have done that?), you probably feel like it's just you. That everyone else around you feels fine and is having a great, fulfilling experience. But they probably aren't. That feeling of being stuck is pretty common. Most of us have spent weeks, months or even whole careers feeling like that. It's not much fun. It's draining. Soul destroying. It leads to stress, burnout and just plain unhappiness. Fortunately, there is something you can do about it.

Failure is part of all of our lives. None of us is perfect (sorry if that comes as a shock to you). We all, in spite of the aura of competence we project, fail at things constantly. From the major things like failed relationships and doomed projects to the smaller stuff. The failure to resist that block of chocolate. The failure to concentrate on writing a blog post and not get distracted by YouTube (yes, guilty, many times). Our lives are a constant string of failures, big and small. 

We tend to talk a good game where it comes to failure - we talk about learning and experience and the idea of failing fast to learn fast, but often, the game we talk, and the game we really play are quite different.  Although our intentions around failure are often good, we often fail to live up to those good intentions (another failure to add to the list). Even when we think we are responding well to failure, our actual response is often quite negative.