Failure (Part 2)

By: James Kyle

So if our attitude to failure can be so self limiting how do we change this self defeating attitude? First let’s look at the power of reframing our experience of life. Consider this:

R.H. Macy failed seven times before his store in New York caught on.
Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs - he also struck out 1,330 times

English novelist John Creasey published 564 books - after he had received 753 rejection slips.

You yourself fell down many times before you eventually managed to walk. As a toddler you didn’t tell yourself I’ll never be able to do this and go to your doctor for a supply of prozac to help you cope with the harshness of life. You just got up and tried again.

Why should it be any different now?

I have another quote for you:

Wayne Dyer once said, There is no such thing as failure! Failing is a judgment that we humans place on a given action. Rather than judgment, substitute this attitude: You cannot fail, you can only produce results! Then the most important question to ask yourself is, “What do you do with the results you produce?”

This is a great quote but I don’t entirely agree. The reality is that there is such a thing as failure - but what Dyer is saying that in most people’s minds there is such a close relationship between the concept of failure and consequential judgment that it serves us best to discard the term failure all together. What this is in fact highlighting is that the real problem is judgment - self judgment!

We need to shift our personal paradigm. Realize that when we criticize and judge ourselves for failure this is a learned behavior. A learned behavior that is not serving us. And we can choose to break out of this ineffective conditioned way of relating to life. In the next post I would like to offer you some tools to help shift your self limiting attitudes to failure.