Think of a time you failed in your life. Maybe you didn’t make a high school sports team, or you tried out for a play and you didn’t get the part. Maybe you saw a job you wanted to have and you weren’t the successful candidate. Maybe you put yourself out there and you were rejected.
Failure is a part of life.
How do we take those failures and turn them from these potential roadblocks, to stepping stones, into what’s next for us?
When we’re kids we are given full permission to fail. We fail our way as we’re learning to walk, as we’re learning how to ride the bike, to read, to learn math. We’re constantly failing and course correcting.
Something happens as we become adults, and we stop giving ourselves permission to fail. And when we face a failure or a setback, what can happen is we put on the brakes and we stop. And we stop moving forward with what’s really important to us.
Let me give you some examples of highly successful people who have faced failures in their life, but they made a choice to face that adversity and still pursue their greatness.
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Thomas Edison. As he was creating a system for illumination, he failed between two to ten thousand times. When he was asked about that, he said “I didn’t fail, I got 2,000 pieces of feedback.” He recognized that with every time things didn’t work out for him, he was learning, “not this way, there’s got to be a better way.” As we’re looking at our own failures, we want to have that mindset. It’s simply feedback saying not this way.
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Serena Williams won 23 major tennis championship, she lost 26.
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Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, he’ll tell you he lost over 9,000 shots, including 26 of the game-winning shots. We look to athletes, we look to highly successful people, and it’s easy to think they’ve never had failures. The truth is, they’ve had massive failures. They’ve just chosen to face that adversity, and choose to continue on to pursue their passion.
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Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, developed a motto “Fail Fast”. He knew failure was going to be a part of the journey of building his company, his brand, and his product, so he made the decision, “I want to fail fast so we can get the learning.”
As you’re looking at your past failures, the key here is to be able to see that failure as an opportunity to learn, to grow, to expand, to try something different. It’s easy to hang on to past failures, when things didn’t go our way, and those prevent us from putting ourselves out there. They prevent us from continuing to try to keep going.
I created a meditation to help you break through that failure. Make sure you grab that meditation, it’s going to help you really reframe past failures into learning so you can use that as a launching pad into what’s next for you.
Failure is part of growth, we would never say to a child who fell off the bike, “Sorry, not meant to be! You shouldn’t try anymore.” It would be crazy! We tell our kids “Get back on, you got this, you can do it!”
It’s the same for us – just because you had that rejection, things didn’t work out – keep trying, keep going. It’s simply feedback saying “not this way.” You may not be able to see right now how that failure can help you grow.
Download that meditation, let me help you reprogram those memories, those failures, to really help you live a life you love.
Stacey
