Taking Credit for Your Failures

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It’s only natural that people find it much easier to take credit for successes than failures. You’ve probably never heard someone say, “I’ll take credit for that failure.” It’s almost laughable, isn’t it? We’d rather take credit for success. 

Let’s say a child grows up to be a well-known professional athlete. You will find individuals who coached that person in elementary school and middle school taking some kind of credit for their success. We all love to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to success. But have you ever jumped on the bandwagon for a failure? Think about your job. Did something happen at work that you had a small part in, but you let your co-worker take most of the heat? Have you ever looked at one of your own children and thought that a particular situation went badly because of your influence on them? Have you looked at your siblings and realized that you might be the reason that a specific thing happened within your home or with your family that was less than positive?

I understand the motivation behind someone not wanting to acknowledge failure. It doesn’t feel good! We hope that if we ignore it, maybe it will go away. But it won’t. Unless they are dealt with appropriately, failures have a way of hanging around. 

I think that taking credit for a failure can be just as helpful as taking credit for a success. When we do that, we acknowledge that the buck stops with us. We also help our families realize that we aren’t that messed up, we just have a situation that we need to deal with so that we can move forward. It’s important that we don’t let our failures define who we are, and that we don’t start believing that we are failures just because we fail. We may have failed at some things, but that doesn’t make us failures. There’s a difference. 

Sometimes, taking credit for a failure can lead to more positive relationships down the road. If we only take credit for what goes right in our lives, we’ll stop growing because we won’t think we have any areas in our lives where we need to grow. As you look around your family life today, think about whether there is something that has happened that you’ve ignored or disowned because it looks like failure. 

When we are responsible adults who take credit for failures, we actually become much more balanced as individuals. The bottom line is that we all have failures. We are all responsible for some of them somewhere. I’m encouraging you today to show some maturity, own up to them, and win more often at home.