Is Failure a Crisis?

It’s NOT a crisis when a goal is missed.

 It’s a crisis when we miss goals and don’t know why.

Failure is never the problem.  See, it’s not the failure itself that does us in.  it’s how we respond to failure. 

 What we typically do -

•  Either measuring your failures against those of others or convincing yourself that your circumstances were harder than theirs.
•  Telling yourself and others that you have good reasons for not getting over past hurts and mistakes. Believing that those who encourage you “just don’t understand.”
•  Pulling back and keeping yourself separate from others, either to avoid dealing with the issues, or to continue to feel sorry for yourself.
•  Getting stuck lamenting or trying to fix things that cannot be changed.
•  Feeling like a victim and blaming others for negative outcome

Nobody likes to fail. But if we’re honest, we understand that failure is a part of life. There is no success without some amount of failure. Great inventors like Thomas Edison experience a lot of failures on the way to a successful invention. Even the best baseball players strike out much more often than they hit a home run.

Anyone pursuing a goal of value will make mistakes and wrong decisions.  Let me say that again... ANYTIME YOU ARE WORKING TO GET BETTER, YOU WILL HAVE FAILURES.  

Your failures can get you down and waste your time, or they can make you better.

Here are five behaviors of people who waste their failures - 

1.  They waste failures against those of others or convincing yourself that your circumstances were harder than theirs.
2.  Telling yourself and others that you have good reasons for not getting over past hurts and mistakes. Believing that those who encourage you “just don’t understand.”
3.  Pulling back and keeping yourself separate from others, either to avoid dealing with the issues, or to continue to feel sorry for yourself.
4.  Getting stuck lamenting or trying to fix things that cannot be changed.
5.  Feeling like a victim and blaming others for negative outcomes.

The key is to expect failure, to prepare for it, to be ready to turn it into a lesson and a stepping-stone to success.

Here's what a 'successful failure' looks like...

1. Find the benefit in every bad experience. Thomas Edison redefined the failures in his experiments as “10,000 ways that won’t work.” He expected failure and counted it as one of the costs of finding a way that would work. By finding the benefit in the failure, he was able to keep attempting something great. Optimism is not limited to a few people as a personality trait. Optimism is a choice. And while it doesn’t guarantee immediate positive results, it does result in higher motivation and stronger character.
2. Take responsibility without blaming, complaining or defending. When we fail at something, it’s easy to blame someone or something else. Perhaps the circumstances or the people that we worked with. But failure is a learning opportunity. If I blame someone else, I’m just cheating myself out of that lesson. Responsibility is more important than reputation. And it tends to lead to reward, which can lead to more responsibility. Your willingness to take responsibility marks you as someone who’s mature and can be trusted to learn from the failure and keep trying.
3. Resilience. Say goodbye to yesterday. The ability to move on from failure is key to continuing to attempt great things. The mind can only focus on so much, so if we’re still too focused on what we did wrong, we can’t give all of our attention to attempting to do things right.
4. Make adjustments and Move Ahead. In taking initiative be certain that you’ve made adjustments. What have you changed, tweaked or improved? Simply trying again without making any changes only results in making the same mistakes over and over again. That’s unacceptable,

When we make mistakes and then consider trying again, we all feel some measure of fear. Facing the unknown, we easily come up with a list of things to worry about, which doesn’t  help us at all in accomplishing our goals. As Corrie ten Boom said, “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength” Just believing that failure can be good isn’t enough to help us succeed. We need to act on that belief and take a step forward again in pursuit of our dream. Only then do we learn from our mistakes and make progress.  

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

– Thomas A. Edison