Failure. Rejection. If you aren't ready to crash and burn, can you really try something new, daring, or adventurous? Resilience to failure is a skill just like any other, and must be learned if you wish to be bold and creative in your life and work. But how? One option is mental - practice envisioning the very worst possible outcome to the situation (which usually isn't all that bad!), or remembering all the successes you've had in the past. A more drastic technique is to be like Jia Jiang in the TED Talk below and try 'exposure therapy,' purposefully failing time and time again to try and reduce the hurt. But no matter what, it's worth realizing that everyone fails and gets rejected, and that you can bounce back and learn from it! Only in this way can you give yourself the space to try new things, and learn and grow in the meantime.
 
We have a pretty interesting exercise on embracing failure that we do in our Positive Leadership workshop, if you want to dig a little deeper. And we're offering the course twice in upcoming months - in October and December! Shoot us an email at centre@upeace.org to learn more!
What we're reading:
Everyone messes up, and when we do, it's easy to look for excuses in the surrounding environment, doubt our own worth, or berate ourselves for making a mistake in the first place. What if we could practice failure and develop steps to help us overcome it? This article suggests some wonderful, concrete ways to try to turn a failure around, from self-compassion to envisioning what advice you would give to a friend in a similar position. Buck up - you're probably better off in the long run!
What we're watching:
So if you're scared of rejection, what would be the most audacious thing you could do? Jia Jiang addresses his plan to seek out 100 straight days of failure in this funny TED Talk, tackling everything from asking a stranger to borrow $100, to ringing a random doorbell and asking to plant a flower in the backyard. He gradually started to desensitize himself to the pain of rejection, learning valuable lessons about how to turn a 'no' into a 'yes,' and losing a lot of fear along the way.
What we're inspired by:



"Do something that scares you every day." 


Eleanor Roosevelt
The Centre's Team
UPEACE Centre for Executive Education 
University for Peace, established by the General Assembly of the United Nations

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