Failure. What is failure?
What is failure if not an opportunity to grow.
Like everything it is exactly what you decide for it to be. You have the choice to make it a learning experience, or you can allow it to consume you and bring you down. For some reason as a society we have accepted that failure is something we want to avoid and that it defines you in some way, that you can never come back from it.
We tip toe around life in trying to avoid failure. And for what?
What if I told you that failure could be your best friend. That its all about how you choose to view failure, because failure is nothing more than a mental construct. That failure is completely necessary in order to achieve success.
We are afraid of failure because people have told us that failing is bad, that it somehow makes us lesser of a person. In school we were rewarded for success and punished for failing. I’m here to tell you that you can choose to believe something else. To tell you that you can completely change your relationship with failure. Because nothing has meaning except the meaning you choose to give it. I’m here to remind you that you have a choice.
Let’s dive deep now, the quality of your life is determined by the state you find yourself in. When we meet an obstacle in life if we begin to focus on that obstacle we are giving all of our time and energy to that thing. We begin to create these storylines in our heads that end in the worst case scenario. Instead of giving our time and energy to a solution we feel that looking at the obstacle will somehow make it better. We must realize that our focus determines our reality. And what we focus on largely determines how we feel, which determines how we act, and so on. When we begin to remove our focus from the obstacle and we ask ourselves “What is this trying to teach me? How can I grow from this? What is it that I must do to solve this?” We position ourselves in a place of power. Our focus now goes to what we can do. We are now in a state of resourcefulness to face the problem. So we can agree that a person who is in a state of resourcefulness is going to create a better outcome than someone who is stuck focusing on the problem.
Failure is like this. Instead of feeling that we are powerless over our failures, we find our power within them. By asking better questions. We no longer ask “Why did this happen to me? What did I do wrong?” We are now asking ourselves empowering questions “Who must I become in order to resolve this? What lesson is here for me to learn? What good is here that I presently cannot see?” By asking these questions we are put into our power.
Our questions will always be answered.
The question is what answers would you like to receive?
Ask a powerful question, receive a powerful answer. The quality of our questions determine the quality of our answers.
So failure is nothing to fear or avoid, but something you can embrace. We are not afraid to fail, we are afraid to hear what others are going to say when we do. Or better yet we are afraid of what we will say about ourselves, to ourselves. But once you change what failure means to you, once you see it as a means of growing then we are no longer going to judge ourselves or others for it. Failure is a part of all good systems. Google, as a company, when they set goals, 50% of them are made to fail. 50% of their goals are meant to be attained. You’re supposed to fail.
Make mistakes. Successful people are only successful because they have made mistakes but they have not let that interfere with their determination to succeed. They kept moving, until they hit their goal. Success comes from doing the “right” things, and doing “right” things usually comes from doing the “wrong” ones and knowing what not to do the next time. Benjamin Franklin would say that he had not failed a single time, that he had simply found 1000 ways that it did not work. When asked if he was discouraged he replied “Not at all, for I have learned fifty thousand ways it cannot be done and therefore I am fifty thousand times nearer the final successful experiment.”
Adopting this mindset around mistakes and failure serves us greatly, because once we are no longer afraid to fail, we open up our to greater possibilities of success.
I leave you with this, you are not defined by your failures, you are not defined by your success. You are whatever you choose to be. Let’s choose to be courageous in the face of any obstacle. Let’s choose to live out our dreams and go into the world as the best version of ourselves that we can possibly be. Don’t be afraid to try. If you really think about it, you’ve got nothing to lose. Find the value and the lesson within every failure. They will lead you to success.
Until next time friend,
Camila Tracanelli
