‘’One of the secrets of life is
to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks’’…….. Jack Penn
‘’Sometimes it is better to fail than to succeed because
failure leads to great achievement eventually’’…… Robert Schuller
Hmm … Failure! Failure!!
Failure!!! … Are you depressed right now because of some of the ugly
events of the past especially the once characterized by failure? Ride on!
It might
interest you to know that, most of the people we see as successful individuals
today are those who have witnessed failure and interpreted it as the
ingredients of success. They saw failure as stepping stone to success. Remember
Rome was not built in a day. Those who see themselves as failure are people who
did not realize how close they were to success before they quit.
John Roger and McWilliams wrote ‘’
The common denominators of all successful people is persistence’’. Life really is not
static, little wonder the Japanese assents, ‘’Fall seven times, rise eight
times.
Most at times failure only suggest that your previous technique for
success may not have been adequate or was not carried out properly. It makes
you step in your tracks and make the decision to abandon whatever it is you are
doing right now, to follow another track where your success lies.
In creating the pathway to
success, failure is put in the dashboard of our lives in order to be seen
moving. Sometimes, we neglect the warning sign and go on into the imaginative scenes of emotions. Without failure, some of the things we appreciate now,
would not have been discovered.
Failure is an opportunity for
learning, growing, improving and transforming. The key to transforming failure
is in what we do when we fail… The right attitude to failure.
Staci J. Shelton proposed the
steps for turning into success to include:
Regroup: Whenever you fail to
achieve your proposed goal, the first thing to do is to re-group, although one
feels frustrated when he/she fails to achieve his /her expectation, process the
feeling, forgive yourself and take a break. Give yourself time to emotionally
process what just happened. Appreciate how you feel, what you didn’t live,
and more importantly, identify how you want things to go the next time.
When you neglect to regroup, you
will be at the risk of making decisions born
out of fear, doubt, panic, anger or all of this. Be conscious of the
facts that trial and error are all part of the journey. Success doesn’t come
immediately.
Review: Even if you feel that
the whole project collapsed, when you look back at it, there is always
something that worked. What things went extremely well?
What did you feel good about?
Note all these things. They will boost your confidence and help you look
objectively at part two of the review process, looking at the things that did
not do so well.
Redesign: This involves
adjustments and improvements. Retain what worked, change what didn’t and
redesign your experience. Review and keep those that worked, and have a new
plan for success. This leads to the next step, which is to put it into action.
Relaunch: You can never be
successful if you remain stuck in analysis and let the fact that the first,
second, fourth or twentieth venture wasn’t a success. Launch your new and
improved process. When we fail and not getting what we want, offer us
opportunity to learn and develop. It is not avoiding failure that creates
success. It is what we learn from it that covers.
It doesn't matter how many times you fail in life, what matters is your attitude when you fail.
