Failure is Your BEST Teacher; Embrace Him

Your relationship to failure is what dictates your long-term success.  If you avoid failure, fear it and try never to make a mistake, you can never grow and develop in ways necessary to accomplish your biggest dreams.  If you view failure as part of your life’s journey–as a teacher, if you will–you can reap all of the great benefits failure has in its pocket for you.

In a course I’m currently leading based on a John  Maxwell book, he says that we must “change failure from a detour to a dividend.”  In order to do this, or fail forward, you must attack your dreams with passion and action and be awake to the times you fail.

Failure is filled with lessons.  If you can appreciate the value of failure, you can allow it to strengthen you.  There is no successful person in life who has not failed over and over again.  It’s important that you don’t take failure personally.  Your failures are designed to be red flags to direct you to the places you are weakest.  They teach you where you need to improve and grow; they even redirect your path if you are getting off purpose.

Failure is not a four letter word.  Successful people don’t fear it or try to avoid it at all costs.  Successful people keep a sense of humor about themselves and their failures.  They take full responsibility for what happened and examine how to change the results next time they try… and, they never stop trying.

I once read a quote that failure doesn’t exist… there is just quitting.  The only time you fail is when you stop.  Where are you stopped today?  How can you pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start again?

CALL TO ACTION:  What is your current relationship to failure?  What can you do today to begin to experience life as a journey and failure as your best teacher?  Is there an area where you are stopped that you can take a failure, examine it and learn from it, and then, TODAY, begin again?

I’d love to hear your “wins!”  Please come back and share what happened!