Making Failure Your Friend
Today’s blog is going to share with you some of the profound lessons that impacted me from an interview I heard by Darren Hardy, Publisher of Success Magazine. He was interviewing Todd Duncan on the subject of Risk and Failure. The title of the interview was “On Making Failure Your Friend” and there were so many nuggets of gold, I was furiously taking notes to capture all of the “ahas” contained within. I want to share his wisdom with all of you, so here are some of his quotes, along with my thoughts.
So many of us are bogged down in the struggles of life, feeling dissatisfied, stuck, resentful. Mr. Duncan suggested we remember, “Whatever you are in, you are not stuck in it”. Regardless of our circumstances, we always have choices. They may not be ideal or even desirable, but they are choices nonetheless. To stay mindful of that is to empower yourself to change and grow.
He also said, “Wherever you are going, it’s never a matter of IF, it’s only a matter of WHEN you get there.” In other words, stay on the journey and eventually you will arrive. The only way to keep yourself from arriving is to either quit along the path or never initiate the journey in the first place. Get going! Just take one initial step and see where your feet lead you. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”
Mr. Duncan shared his spin-off quote from one of Jim Rohn’s famous quotes. Duncan’s version is, “If it were not possible to fail, it would be impossible to succeed.” He challenged us to ask ourselves, “What if I actually saw all failure as success? What would I attempt to achieve?” He suggested, “Stop seeing failure as a breakdown. Reframe failure as a break-through.” He further suggested, “When going through the gray area of failure, super-size your dreams. I made them enormous. I find most people, in the midst of the gray area of failure, stop dreaming, and, if you stop dreaming, you’re dead. Every road to success is going to inevitably pass through the land of failure”.
It all comes down to our interpretation of failure. When we reframe failure as an integral part of our path to success, we’re far more willing to keep moving through the failures we encounter. Think about toddlers learning to walk. Oftentimes, they spend more time on their butts than on their feet, but they don’t take those “failures” personally; they just pick themselves up and try again…until they conquer the skill of walking. Imagine if we all approached new tasks and situations with the philosophy that we would keep trying until we figured it out. The world would be a vastly different place than it is at the moment.
Fear of failure is really nothing more than a self-confidence issue. All reluctance to try is a symptom of lack of self-confidence. Again, we could take a lesson here from the toddler. The child doesn’t think “Well, I’m just a failure as a walker; I need to settle for crawling for the rest of my life. I’m just not good enough.” Rather, the child thinks “Well, that didn’t work. Let’s try this again!” The child operates from the subconscious belief that the Law of Gravity has nothing personal against that child; it’s just how life is…gravity operates. The same for our grown-up failures: it’s not that Life has it in for us personally. Events just unfold in ways that allow us the opportunity to learn valuable lessons for living. We then get to choose if we embrace those lessons and forge ahead or cave in to the victim mentality and elect to remain stuck.
How often do we fail to take a positive action because we’ve already projected a negative outcome on an event that has not yet happened? Mr. Duncan stated this is “a negative projection into your future not tied to the outcome you want, but the outcome you fear. Because it’s pulled from your past, it pulls you backward.” He advises, “Never give your power away to an event that has not yet occurred.”
Mr. Duncan’s rebuttal to the idea that “Hope is not a strategy” is a joy to consider: “In the midst of failing, experiencing set-backs, having to keep moving on, hope is the best strategy there is. Keeping your hope alive keeps your heart alive and sets you up for forward progress and success.” I believe hope also puts us in the position of looking for ideas, options, alternative routes forward. Hope is the wind in the sails as we chart our course across imposing waters.
Given all of this, you might ask, “So what do I do now?” Duncan recommends several endeavors to move yourself out of a fear of failure mentality and into embracing failure for the wonderful tool it is. First, he suggests keeping a success journal which is actually filled with your failures and the amazing lessons gleaned from those which set you up to move closer to success each time.
He also recommends asking yourself 4 questions designed to help you reframe any difficulty you encounter:
What is good about this?
How can I use this as a positive force in the next 24-48 hours?
What are the top 2-3 gifts this mistake has given me for the rest of my life?
What skill or strategy do I need to regroup on so this never happens again?
One last quote from Mr.Duncan to send you on your way today:
There’s nothing wrong with failing and there’s everything wrong with not trying.