By Jamie Gilbert
Are you good at failure?
What a strange question! Notice I didn’t ask “are you a failure?”
Today I raced the “Freedom 4 Miler.” Was I successful? Kind of? I’m realizing recently that I am terrible at failure!! Stay with me on this thought… Surprisingly to many of you I’m a bit of a perfectionist 🙂 I approach every task with a certain level of what it means to be successful…and…often I can’t meet my own expectations.
So what does that look like? If I don’t perform according to planned I think I have failed. If I eat right for half the day and have a misstep…I have failed…but what do I do with that failure? Self pity? Give up? Tell myself I’m too old, too busy? It’s so easy to resign ourselves to failure without really considering what we learn from that experience and how to move forward with it.
In his book “Failing Forward,” John Maxwell provides a list of 15 steps for failing forward. Step #1: Realize there is one major difference between average people and achievers. The difference is how they respond to failure.
Today I embrace my version of failure…did I give up a little bit during that race…yes…can I do better…yes…do I have the power to change how I handle it..ABSOLUTELY!
So how do you respond to failure? Have you used failure to be successful ~ or ~ be a failure?
