Failure – Destructive or Instructive ?
How do you deal with failure? Do you learn from it or do you let it overpower you and you find it difficult to pick yourself up from it and move on. Is failure destructive for you or do you allow it to be instructive and constructive? Failure does not have to become a trend.
Some people have a difficult time when they fail. They believe that it is a trend in their lives and instead of learning from it, dusting themselves off and moving on, they tend to waddle in it and allow failure to become the dominant force in their lives. It doesn’t have to be that way.
In dealing with it, first we have to admit that failing is a part of life. At one time or another, we are all going to fail. Some us fail multiple times in a day, others, weekly, and some maybe only monthly. The frequency in which we fail depends on our occupation and situation in life. For instance, if we are an athlete, we are going to lose some games. Losing is failure. If we are in sales we are never going to close 100% of our sales. The bottom line is that failure makes us human.
Make Failure Instructive – Learn From It!
What will separate you from others, however, is how you deal with failing. It is something that we should learn from. Failure should be instructive. Years ago when I first got into selling, after I had made a sales call regardless if I closed the sell or not, I was taught to do a post call analysis. I would sit in my car, jot down my notes and then figure out what went well in the sales call and what went wrong. Once I had figured out what went wrong I could put a plan into action for improvement. I tried to learn from my mistakes so that those mistakes could lead to success.
The bottom line is that when we fail, once we learn why we failed, we can build on that learning. We can use failure to help us construct a plan of success. Sometimes we find that through analysis, the smallest margin determines success or failure. We find that we really are not far off from success. However, if we allow failure to overtake us, we will never be able to clear our vision and see that success may only be a tenth of a second away.
When failing, make it instructive – learn from it. Then make it constructive – build a life of success based on your past failures.
[amazon_link asins=’0785288570,0470627603,B01N7L7T70,0062364286,1451639619,1599951681,0345472322′ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’lonnieheathco-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’28a59bc6-ceab-11e6-8f68-53033d9c4c26′]
