Without failure, there can never be success.
It doesn’t usually work out that the first attempt at something is the last, best, most successful attempt. First, we fail. From that failure, we learn. We try again. We improve. Eventually, we do succeed. This is just a simple fact of life.
Even so, we tend to hide or deny our failures (even from ourselves when possible). We shift blame and quickly move away from anything less than perfect. By doing so, we miss out on our very best learning opportunities.
Instead of beating a hasty retreat from our failures, we should embrace them. In fact, we should proudly own them. They are badges of honor that signal our humility, our willingness to learn, our struggle to succeed, and our humanness. Only when we own our failures can we move past them and on to something better.
If you own it, you can call it YOUR FAILURE. You can call it YOUR FAILURE without even flinching. Try it. Do it again. It’s okay because we all have them.
When you get comfortable with YOUR FAILURE, you can move away from the judgment of it (which was likely self-imposed). You can look at it objectively, dissect it, see what caused it, consider it from every angle, and completely disempower it. You take control of YOUR failure and turn it into your success.
If you won’t own it, you’ll continue to feel it in that other context – YOU’RE FAILURE. It will have a hold on you that prevents you from moving forward. It will be like quicksand, and you will be stuck. No one else will have labeled it this way, the way you think they have. If you are able to objectively look around, you’ll see that no one is laughing and pointing. This is all overblown in your own mind because we try to avoid failure. You are not failure. You are human, and all humans fail. The only thing that really matters is how you handle your failure.
You have the power to own it, to make it YOUR FAILURE. Only when you take it, accept it, learn from it and move on can you truly succeed.
