Here’s some advice that I’ve found to be true across romantic, sexual, and creative realms: The more that you fail at something, the more you’ll learn about how to succeed at that thing instead – and the happier you’ll be, because you’ll learn that failure does not kill you.
This principle runs so counter to my nature that I’ve had to learn it over and over again, and even today as I’m writing this, I’m still not sure I 100% believe it (although, trust me, it is true). As a former “gifted & talented” kid, I often get frustrated with myself whenever I struggle with anything at all: cooking a new meal, trying a new art form, going to a new place. You’re supposed to be smart! says the critical voice in my head. You can’t embarrass yourself by being bad at things, especially where other people could see! I’ve given up on many endeavors simply because I wasn’t instantly good at them (ninth-grade ballet class comes to mind…) and I’m sure that in doing so, I’ve lost out on a lot of joy/fun/learning.
These days, I am trying to get more comfortable with failure. One of the best ways to do this is to take an improv class – and in fact, the first improv class I ever took, in the eleventh grade, was where I initially learned this lesson, because improv is the perfect training ground for tolerating failure. Sure, your first ~dozen terrible scenes will leave you ruminating shamefully on your mistakes for a while (if you’re anything like me, anyway), but once you’ve done enough of them, you see how ephemeral these scenes are. You also see that your classmates (probably) don’t judge you for fucking up, because they’ve had their own fuck-ups too, most of which you probably forgot about instantly, same way they probably forgot about yours. You see that each time you fail, you learn a bit more about what not to do (especially if you have a great teacher who reinforces these lessons in constructive ways), and so you get better and better over time.
I think the emotional side of “failure tolerance” is its most valuable aspect, though. The more times you’ve failed, the less afraid you become of failure, which allows you to take bigger risks, since you know even the worst-case scenario is endurable. I think getting good at improv is less about adding skills (though it’s that too) and more about subtracting fear and self-judgment, since good improv comes from a flow-state place of trusting your gut and following your momentary impulses – and in the same exact way, I think we get braver and better at life in general when we know that failure will not kill us, and will, in fact, only make us hotter. Uh, I mean, stronger.