Faye Reid

Determining what failure means to you, will determine your reaction to failure and will determine how successful you will become. Attaching a negative meaning on failure generates a negative emotional reaction and negative behavior, resulting in a road block to your success. Approaching failure as a necessary occurrence before success ensures you reach your goal.

Our reaction to failure stems from past experiences and relationships. Feedback from past mistakes, blunders and failures can make you feel that you are not good enough, unworthy, you are incapable and abandoned. So any unsuccessful risk can cause confirmation of those beliefs and precipitate behaviors from you which can cause abandonment.

These negative meanings live in your mind, and it takes a conscious effort to overcome them so that you do not experience the feelings and resulting reactions such as defensiveness, protectiveness, aggressiveness or to withdraw and stop trying.

Look at your history of avoiding taking risks, trying new things or where you have stopped trying to succeed. Your messages about what failure means to you and the resulting negative feelings are probably keeping you stuck and blocking your success.

Listen to the thoughts in your mind when you think about attempting something new or to succeed where you have previously failed. Become aware of your feelings and you will learn the reason why you have given up, become defensive, feel abandoned or become aggressive. You can decide to make the effort to change your reaction, change the meaning of failure to you and find the opportunity to improve the skills needed to succeed.

Mistakes are normal, failed attempts are guaranteed, but they are learning opportunities and a necessary hurdle on the way to success. Price Pritchett, author of Fast Growth suggests that, “unless you allow yourself to make mistakes you will never have the opportunity to test the limits of what you truly are capable of accomplishing.” If you learn from mistakes, take on the responsibility to correct them and time to improve, then move on. Keep in mind that if you are not experiencing failure, mistakes or challenges you are probably not experiencing growth or meaningful achievement.

Success depends on your willingness to take risks and with risks come chaos, anxiety and occasionally, failure. People may become critical and abandon you. You’ll be tempted to retreat to the false security before you took the risk. Don’t fall into that trap and sink into permanent failure. The difficulties are moments of learning and opportunities for improvement and success.

Faye Reid is a Personal Development coach.