Podcast Length: 4:37
“When we give ourselves permission to fail, we at the same time give ourselves permission to excel.” ~ Eloise Ristad
There is no success without failure. If there ever was then I’d venture to guess that success was either stolen, devalued, under-appreciated or overlooked.
Success is achieved only after overcoming obstacles, typically a series of obstacles, both perceived and unexpected, that demand we experience both to even conceive the difference.
Failure by its very nature demands introspection; that we re-evaluate our intentions, our approach, and our values. How did we get here? How many times have you thought that very thing in your life? Since your last major life experience? Since the pandemic began?
What do we want? What is it we’re after, exactly? What is it we’re trying to accomplish?
You define this for yourself, whether you intend to or not. You have specific expectations: for your career, your love life, yourself.
To learn from past missteps and stumbles, acknowledge what you did or didn’t do. An objective re-evaluation of your approach, your conditioning: your gut vs. reality, your impulses vs. the expected. Weed through your rationalizations, both real and imagined, that you may not have ever honestly voiced out loud, but considered solely within yourself.
The ability to assess how risk averse you and your approach may be often can only be determined AFTER you’ve experienced some degree of failure. Nevertheless, many avoid ever trying again after experiencing setbacks, or proceeding again due to the impulse to simply move past the problem(s). Proper coaching should assist in you re-evaluating your initial approach to avoid facing the same or added impediments.
Consider your expectations from the onset? Are they realistic? How might you alter your approach, even slightly, to improve your outcome.
Success is often accomplished while enroute toward a wholly different goal, which means identifying and acting on opportunities as they present themselves.
Possibly the greatest accomplishment from failure you can develop is creative problem solving, thinking on your feet, allowing yourself to experience the moment in real time. Which directly translates into trusting your impulses. Trusting yourself. It’s a form of conditioning. Much like your physical health, its basic mental hygiene, regardless of how distasteful that expression may be.
My point is if you frustrate easily, perhaps you need to take baby steps to building your meddle. This is where coaching and surrounding yourself with kindred spirits improves your odds. Build your trusted team.
But if you don’t take those initial steps, and you avoid tackling and weathering the tough stuff, you’ll never know for yourself that you can survive obstacles, setbacks and loss. All loss, much like success, is temporary. It’s fleeting, although it rarely seems like it while we’re muddling through.
We all experience being crestfallen and defeated. As much as those who may love us may try to spare us from disappointment, the only way out of the messy stuff is to persevere through it. There is life and accomplishment on the other side, whether we see it or believe it from where we’re sitting or not.
If it’s true we become the effect of that which we resist, then resisting failure inevitably becomes the outcome instead of the results we had intended and continue to strive for. So do your best to embrace the entirety of the experience.
It’s the totality of that experience that defines your success. No one gets to pick and choose no matter how entitled or lofty your position may allow. Because life isn’t about avoiding risk, it’s about including and accounting for it on the path to your personal and very individual success.
Copyright © 2024 by Kate McClanaghan. All Rights Reserved.
