1)Failure is normal. Everyone has faced failure. Some people talk about their failures. Some people don't talk about their failures, which makes it look like they never fail. Don't believe it. 2)Define or refine. Failure can define you or refine you. If you quit, you have allowed failure to define you. If you keep going, learn from it and get stronger, you have used failure to refine you. 3)Learn from it. Every failure has something to teach us, if we will only be teachable. To be teachable we need to ask good questions such as "What contributed to this failure?" "What can I do differently and/or better next time?" "What's obvious now that I couldn't or wouldn't see before?" 4)Change your definition of failure. We live in an either/or culture. Either you totally succeed or you completely fail. Many times it's neither. In baseball, you are considered very successful if you hit the ball one out of every three times you come up to bat. 5)Redefine what failure means to you. A failure is simply evidence that you took a shot at accomplishing something, that you want to be a doer instead of just a talker. Most people are just talkers. They believe their own talk and then accomplish little, if anything. If you have failed, it can mean you are a doer instead of a talker. 6)Successful people fail often. How can you be successful and fail often? You become successful by taking risks. Risk implies that you might fail. Otherwise it would not be called risk-taking; it would be called sure-thing taking. Babe Ruth was the strikeout king of baseball at the same time he was the home-run king of baseball. 7)Build on your failures. Many of the great success stories are built on what was learned from failure or the motivation that can come from failure. Michael Jordan failed to make his high school basketball team. He seems to have built on that failure fairly well. You and I can, too. 8) Don't fear failure. The fear of failure holds us back from doing many of the things we would like to do. 9) Give up your belief in failure. A wise person once said "Failure? I've never encountered it. I've just learned lots and lots of ways that don't work, and turned that into a few successes." 10) Never, ever give up. An ancient Japanese proverb suggests that we are to "fall down seven times, get up eight." |
