There's an old adage that failure is how we learn. And it's true. We learned to walk by standing up, taking a step, losing our balance, falling down, and then getting up again. We learned to talk by repeating sounds over and over until the things we were trying to communicate became intelligible to the people around us.

But the truth is that we don't don't always LEARN from failure. This may be especially true as we grow older. In fact, research by psychologists Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach has shown that most of us respond to failure by trying to brush over it or tune it out. We have to choose to learn from failure. That requires us to dig deep, looking honestly at our failures and identifying the reasons we failed. Learning from failure is hard and often painful work.

One of the reflection questions that I ask clients on their intake forms is " what is your most common self-limiting behavior?" Most of them say something like, "I avoid taking on new challenges because I'm afraid I might fail. I like to stick to the things I'm good at." If I were completing the form, I'd probably write something similar.

There are reasons we avoid failure. For one thing, it can be very threatening to our egos to fail at something, particularly when our failure will be public. And many of us grew up in families, schools, or cultures where people were shamed or punished for failure. Sticking to the things we know we do well is comfortable; failure is not.

In order to learn from our failures, we must take the risk of failing in the first place and then we must choose not to let fear stop us from trying again.

Brene' Brown has a new book entitled Strong Ground, and a friend and I have been working through it together. A few weeks ago, we read the section that included work from Harvard researcher Sarah Lewis. Lewis says that a better way to think about failure is to use a nineteenth century synonym for the word: "blankness." Blankness, she says, implies a wiping clean that is inherent in learning from failure.

Lewis's comments made me think of a great metaphor for the process of learning from failure, one that might be a bit less familiar to my younger readers.

Think back to elementary school when we were learning arithmetic. My teachers often had students come up to the board in small groups--an actual chalkboard with real chalk in my day--where we would work a problem. When we made a mistake, the teacher would instruct us to erase the board and start over. She'd help us identify the point where we went wrong.

In fact, the old expression "wipe the slate clean" originated in the nineteenth century practice of having children write lessons on individual "slates." When the lesson was finished, they used a damp cloth to wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start.

Thinking in metaphor is powerful for me. When I can visualize some physical response to a problem, I can walk myself through solving it--whether that's wiping the chalkboard clean to redo a math problem or wiping the mental slate clean and starting over.

What about you? If you have a metaphor for learning from failure, drop it in the comments.