There is an Alchemist archetype in everyone. It’s the inner force that knows how to transform the lead of failure into the gold of wisdom. The Alchemist is a pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving that recognises a mistake as raw material rather than an endpoint or worse, your identity. At its best, this archetype chooses to recognise every misstep as an opportunity to refine your character, not define who you are. When you activate the highest potential of your inner Alchemist, failure becomes fuel. You stop cycling through the same pattern and start transmuting it into learning, growth and experience. And over time, this becomes a source of personal wisdom.

Every lesson learned reinstates your power. Mistakes are lessons in disguise. If you ignore the lesson, your mind calls it failure so you feel like a failure, then you act like one, and before long, you end up repeating the same old mistake. In effect, you maintain the mistake instead of transforming it into a lesson. But when you learn from the mistake, you grow. You don’t need to be afraid of failure. Instead of an identity, a mistake is a steppingstone to real success and lived experience. 

When you’re determined to learn from your mistakes, you activate the highest potential of your inner Alchemist, the part of you that knows how to turn life’s challenges into catalysts for growth.

Name the lesson. What is it teaching you?

There are 5 steps to transform failure into a lesson:

1. Enter the energy of your Sacred Self by inhabiting a sense of compassion. Pause to acknowledge what happened without judgment or self-attack.
2. Extract the lesson by asking: “What is this trying to teach me?” Which archetype can you use to represent the lesson? (Refer to Table 1 below.) Deconstruct the archetype by brainstorming 6 weaknesses and 6 strengths to gain insights into the lesson.
3. Adjust your approach by identifying what you’ll do differently next time.
4. Apply the learning by taking action quickly so the new pattern takes hold. Refer to your list of strengths for inspiration.
5. Celebrate the growth by acknowledging the courage it takes to evolve.

You can stop failure from becoming a dead end by allowing it to be a doorway to deeper understanding and greater strength. Mistakes demonstrate what doesn’t work. They’re a way of steering you toward what does. They’re opportunities for learning and growing, designed to sharpen your thinking and strengthen your character.

All of which boils down to having faith in your ability to learn and grow. To have faith in growth means to trust that change, learning, and transformation are always possible even when progress isn’t immediately visible. It’s knowing that setbacks, mistakes, and challenges serve a purpose in your evolution rather than define your limits. Faith in growth aligns you with your life’s natural rhythm, in other words, your unique flow. Growth is part of every living system. Having faith in growth means cooperating with that natural flow rather than resisting it by allowing yourself dormant phases, much like the four seasons and the cycles of the moon, knowing they prepare you for renewal.

Faith in growth keeps your heart open when your mind wants to shut you down with doubt. It’s the spiritual muscle that turns your lived experience into wisdom and your potential into reality.

Faith in Growth
Faith in growth reduces your fear of the unknown. It means believing you’ll adapt and learn what you need to handle future challenges. Faith in growth can transform self-judgment into self-compassion. When you trust that you can grow, you stop seeing your flaws as permanent defects and start seeing them as areas for development.

Gail Goodwin 2025

Here are five journal questions designed to help you cultivate faith in growth:

1. When have I overcome something I once thought I couldn’t and what does that tell me about my capacity to grow?
2. What current challenge might be shaping me in ways I can’t yet identify?
3. How do I usually respond to setbacks. Do I resist setbacks or trust that they hold lessons for me?
4. What quality in me is ready to evolve, even if the process feels uncomfortable or uncertain?
5. If I fully trusted that every experience supports my growth, how would I approach today differently?

You don’t need to doubt your ability to learn and grow. You are not the mistake; you are the one transforming it. Every time you choose this perspective you reclaim your power from what once held you back. The purpose of a mistake is to learn from it. If you don’t learn, your mind interprets it as failure. You’ll start to feel like a failure, behave like one, and eventually identify yourself with that label. Every mistake contains wisdom. With the Alchemist archetype awake in you, failure becomes the raw material of transformation.