Have you ever tried and failed?
Have you become frustrated, angry or depressed?
Felt embarrassed or ashamed or felt other were judging you for your failure?
Does it ever feel that no matter what you do you just can't seem to get the result that you want?
If you are like me, then I am sure that in your life you have experienced failure.
Our failures can range from minor to catastrophic and if we don't have the right perception to frame them in can cause us stress.
We can perceive failures in all areas of life,
Relationship or family breakdowns
Financial failure, debt or bankruptcy
Health, fitness or beauty or illness
Social embarrassment
Failing to meet spiritual ideals
Not succeeding in career or business
or not feeling smart enough or failing in education
So what is failure
Failure is feedback that we had a mis-perception, over-estimation, miscommunication or we are living in a fantasy.
When a child learns to walk they fall down many times. This is a failure. It is testing the limits of your skills, abilities, knowledge and emotions.
Failure is not a negative, it's not a positive.
It is neutral feedback that an action you took or an outcome you desired were not truly realistic.
The baby tried to walk but failed. They didn't have the balance, or the strength or the confidence..yet. But the failure is how they build the strength.
Each failure brings them closer to their goal.
The baby doesn't judge itself as a failure, beat itself up or compare itself to other babies.
But as we get older this is something that we tend to do. You can't fail in isolation. You only fail in comparison to someone or something else.
The emotion that you experience is feedback that you were comparing yourself to an ideal and not living up to that.
But what if you allowed yourself to fail?
What if you sought out failure as a means to grow and test your limits?
To give up or keep going?
Have you ever failed at something and given up completely?
Have you ever failed at something, regrouped and had another go?
Is one better than the other?
You will often hear that persistence through failure is the way to success.
So if you fail and give up does that mean you're weak or lacking commitment?
I don't believe that to be true.
When you fail and give up, this is a valuable insight. It allows you to see that what you thought was important to you was not really as important as you thought.
The truth is you didn't value it enough and trying to live outside your own values is futile.
So when you fail, ask yourself..
Do I truly value this enough to pursue this through support and challenge and possibly more failure?
Is this really my goal or am I living how I think I should, must or have to?
Do I feel a sense of relief that I don't have to do this anymore?
So what about when you fail but keep going anyway?
Have you ever had a failure, where people around you advise you to stop, to give up, or not to try it again?
Given your results it may seem logical not to try it again.
But take note of where you keep going despite your failures. Look and see where you may have failed multiple times but you are inwardly driven to keep trying
Look and see where you have failed but have refined the process, learnt lessons and come back with an improved attempt.
This is what you truly value.
When you fail and fail but just keep going, just know that you are on a mission
You are not failing, you're just refining your process
You are meeting resistance because the universe wants you to give the best you have and innovation, and right action are born from breaking through your fantasies about how it should be and finding a solution for how it is
What are the lessons?
When I have failed in the past I have broken it down to the following causes
Living in a fantasy - success without failure is a fantasy
Overestimation - seeking positive feedback
Emotional highs and lows - attraction / repulsion
Ignoring feedback - body, mind, society, god
Wrong action - what action or lack of action is not conducive with a successful outcome
Underlying desire to fail - not aligned with values, a want to give up
Failure to look with foresight at problems and solve them in advance
Handling the emotion
You will never be free of failure but ask yourself, when I have failed where have I simultaneously succeeded?
How has what I have done or not done served me and served others?