Failure That Comes Your Way Over Your Lifetime

Talk to anyone over the age of 50 and they will tell you all the biggest lessons of their life came from failure and learning how to handle mistakes. It may also be that initial trauma and fear of failing again has now tipped over into other areas of your life. And if you think about it this makes sense because if you take something on and execute it perfectly, what is there for you to learn and how would you grow? You already know how to do it, there is no learning there for you. A lot of successful entrepreneurs will look back at their long careers and give thanks for those early failures that taught them to sharpen their skills, go back to school to study or change direction in the career of their choice. Here are three fantastic lessons that failure has to teach us. There may not be as many of them as those who were hanging around when things were going well but each of these tribe members is worth a dozen of those others When you see the benefits of failure shared in a list like this, it makes you want to rush out and embrace all the experiences which may trip you up and leave you with a little egg on your face because as we’ve now seen, you’ve really got nothing to fear and everything to gain from every experience of failure that comes your way over your lifetime. Nobody likes the idea of looking like an idiot in public but nobody ever died from that either. One thing you need to tell yourself is hey, you’re really not important. We live in a world where ’Selfie’ has become a noun and honestly, most people are way more interested in themselves and their own dramas to get involved in yours. If you need to apologize to anyone about what has happened do that, do it sincerely and get it out of the way and then move on. We are not defined by our mistakes or our failures. Take your lesson from your mistake and take the view that actions speak much louder than words.

Into The Great Wide Open

Prove your worth and your value by making sure you did learn a valuable lesson and one you won’t need to repeat to learn again. We have learned to name and face our worst fears and see how they may be holding us back from reaching our full potential and living our best lives. Have you ever heard anyone say, I see she loves herself as any kind of compliment? How many people do you know who are really kind, caring, and considerate of others and then really mean and unkind toward themselves? If you were to bring Real You into this conversation right now what would they say to you? Would they say, Hey, you’ve just described me! Loving and caring for yourself is a skill and one many of us never learn because we feel too guilty to put our own name at the top of the Needs My Care List. This is downright daft because if we don’t look after and love ourselves, we won’t have enough care and compassion to endlessly give to and care for others. We will run out and then feel angry that other people didn’t notice we were running out of steam because we were always running about looking after them! You become one of those who needs assistance. It really is as simple as that. As we have seen, if they had either they would not so desperately need the validation of others. This will likely be the same people that you asked to help you write your list of Signature Strengths, so before you do anything else, make a note of all their names which we will return to shortly. It is a gift of intimacy, not of willpower. In my work as a psychotherapist, I’ve found that we tend to be ashamed of our most unique, passionate, and iconoclastic parts. When we suppress these challenging gifts, we’re left with a sense of emptiness and loneliness. It is astonishing to think that the shame we feel around our most vulnerable attributes is a shame that is universal and because of this, not even our best thinking, says Ken, will budge it.

A Face In The Crowd

So, how do we escape from the clutches of this learned shame that is stopping us from being our Real Selves and expressing all our gifts? The best and sometimes only way out is through our relationships but only those relationships which reflect back to us the deep worth and value of our most vulnerable self. But be honest, is it what you do and have done through your life? Or do you have people in your life who quite like to keep you in your place which is, essentially, somewhere below them. These would be the people who feel threatened by your talents and gifts. You will know when someone is being spiteful because you will feel it. You probably won’t understand it or their motives for being mean but your gut will tell you to protect yourself by putting some serious distance between you and their little spiteful comments and observations. These are the people who are not afraid of your passions and they are not jealous of your gifts. They have the generosity of spirit to want you to grow and reach your full potential without having to hide or compromise who you really are, and these are the people who have no doubt that you are worthy of love, friendship, and respect. Take a few moments to think through the people you have in your life right now and pick out the names of those who meet the criteria above. These are your Relationships of Inspiration. These people, says Ken, are gold and the ones you want to hold on to. My friend was shocked by just how cold and thin her fingers were.