Failing forward is choosing the courage to fail and learn over the comfort of playing small and giving up on your dreams after the first attempt.

We believe that failing is not only a normal but an essential part of learning and living. The minute you leave your comfort zone and enter your learning zone there is only one guarantee and that is you will fail. It does not matter what competence (combination of skill, attitude and knowledge) you try to master, it will take making mistakes and getting it wrong to get it right.

Fail-resilience is the ability to deal constructively with failing and to treat it as a learning experience. The core of being resilient is that you can bounce back after failing even though it hurts and triggers a lot of emotions. Resilience is something you can train and develop like a muscle and we want to encourage people to develop their fail-resilience.

The essential elements of fail-resilience are:

• Being clear on what you are learning and why it is important to you to master it
• Consciously choosing a fail-perspective that supports your learning process. This means that you are able to explore different perspectives on failing and choose the one that supports you the most
• Being aware of the limiting beliefs aka saboteurs and shame triggers that are activated when leaving your comfort zone and have strategies to deal with them
• Having a support system in place that you can call on when you have failed and need to bounce back from it
• The ability to recognize your emotions in a fail moment and feel your way through them

We believe anyone can benefit from developing their fail-resilience and the people who may be the most empowered by this work are those willing to grow and develop.

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Fail Forward as a strategic partnership

Fail Forward is a strategic partnership within Erasmus +: Youth in Action. This means that 4 organisations, Sveitarfelagid Skagafjordur, Molde Kommune, Inspirational Network and Take Initiative, from 4 different European countries, Iceland, Norway, UK and Belgium, have been working together since 2014 to develop the concept of Fail Forward because we believe failing and making mistakes is an essential part of learning.

In the 18 months of this second strategic partnership we further developed the concept of Fail Forward and fail resilience as the key concept & facilitated a training course where we developed and tried out tools that support educators in working on Fail Forward with their learners. This e-course with the 7 most impactful tools is the first intellectual outputs of the project. This course will be online for the next year so the participants can fully try out the content and give feedback on it so the final output can be even more impactful and usable in the context of educators all over Europe.

50 participants enrolled in this course and tried out the tools. Your feedback together with that of the participants of the Edinburgh learning activity was essential for the development of the final ecourse and we want to thank all of you for your active participation and input!

Fail Forward is supported by the European programme Erasmus+:Youth in Action. This website contains the grant receiver's opinions and views. Neither the National agency of Erasmus+:Youth in Action nor the European Commission can be held responsible for the content.