Failure and how to use it

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Failure is a word which can hurt and then can bounce around our consciousness like some ugly dream that repeats and repeats through the night.

Nobody wants to fail – the pressures can be too high not to, the embarrassment too painful, the consequences too dangerous. But remember failing is NOT failure.

But this is only a state of conditioning. Actually unless you fail you can never really know what the criterion of success is. I have died so many times on stage ( in my analysis) that I have often considered giving up. In truth no one in the audience noticed that much and performer friends know exactly how it is for them so they are also quite sympathetic…

The key is how you deal with it. Learn to laugh at it. Give it full respect. See it like it’s just not the time for you and there will be another possibility later . Think of how you will look at it in three weeks time when you tell the story to friends, falling wound laughing. Write a song about it, do a drawing or cartoon of the situation so you can distance yourself from the emotion. Remember the emotion is NOT you and neither is the situation or the judgement you might make about yourself.

A whole series of negatives can follow like a downward spiral if you are not careful to be positive about yourself….it always happens to me, nobody loves me, it’s not the right thing for me  etc.  Those are the steps to ensure that failure is constant unless you keep your perspective in check.

So how to avoid failure ?

1. A good plan – give yourself a clear picture of what you want to achieve, including your lifestyle, your family and your mission.
2. Preparation – you can’t climb Everest until you have the right equipment and some real practical experience with mountain climbing.
3.  Focus – stay in alignment with your task and beware the distractions, especially ‘helpful’ suggestions due to jealousies of others.
4.  Take action – beware talking about things and not doing anything about it
5.  Don’t give up. There will always be resistance of some kind to success – even from your ego sometimes, but also from the world. Problems don’t have to exist – call them challenges and then it is a lot easier to deal with. If you get egg on your face just wash it off…

Melissa Mayer, a modern CEO with guts completely rebirthed YAHOO in a matter of months. What she said about failure:-

The first and foremost is: It’s totally okay to fail; you just need to fail fast, right? So the idea is: Go ahead, take a chance, fail. Maybe you succeed, maybe you fail, but if you don’t end up over investing a ton of time in it, you can move on and do the next thing.

 

 

• A call to action !!

…step out and do the thing you want to – today – give it all you got but do it…. who knows? it might even succeed ! I sure won’t if you don’t action!

….and if you get failure smile and learn from it – you can now take the next step which will bring you closer to you ideal and your dream.