Make Failure A Positive Experience – Featured on The Straits Times (3 Mar 2016)
Make Failure A Positive Experience
How to remain undaunted when things do not go your way
Given a choice, who would want to fail? But if you do not fail, how would you know when you are winning? It is like how we are able to feel joy only after we have experienced sadness. We need both sides of the equation to balance our perspective.
Everyone likes to win. But the fact is, we learn more from our failures than successes. The key question to ask is: How do we get out of the feeling of failure and learn from it as soon as possible so that we can move forward with greater confidence and focus?
Here are three key concepts that you can use to move forward and bounce back quickly when you experience a failure or negative event in your life
Moving Forward 1: Take the lesson and leave the story behind.
One of the things I learned from coaching individuals and leaders is that we tend to be too involved when things go south. We label ourselves as victims and choose to suffer when we can simply take a step back and ask: What can I take away from this?
We should take the lessons and leave the story, or the circum- stance, behind. The lesson we learn is more important that the story, as it will be useful to us in the future. A coachee of mine went through multiple business failures. It seems that whatever he touched would turn to dust. We had a conversation, and I asked him: “Have you learned anything useful from your failure?”
That was when he suddenly realised that failure had taught him about trust in the business world and how building relation- ships requires consistent effort. What is a lesson that you need to learn so that you can leave the story behind? What stories are preventing your people from moving forward with the lessons so that they can finally ignite their performance?
Moving Forward 2: Failures build stronger wings than success.
When we can frame our failures into something meaningful that is when we can turn them into strengths. That is a powerful ability to harness as it builds one’s resilience, which is what will help us to fly higher.
A study has been done on a group of children, following them through from school into their adulthood. These are children who came from less-than-ideal backgrounds, who did not seem to have any chance in life, and finally succeeded.
Those who succeeded were able to turn their situation into strengths and look at things from another perspective. Their resilience increased in tandem with their view of the world. The perspective of your world and failure determines how close you are to success. Build stronger wings today to 0y higher than you think you can.
Moving Forward 3: The Ladder of Success. Not Escalator.
Most of the time, we need to experience multiple failures before we finally taste success. The successes that we see around us are the results of multiple failures. Failures have the capability to skyrocket a person to success.
Without failure, how will you know what works and what doesn’t? Those who succeeded took the ladder, not escalator, of success. There is no such thing as the escalator of success. There is only the ladder. You need to climb up slowly with effort, missing steps along the way and even falling a few steps down. When you are tired, you can stop for a rest, but do not ever stop. To make a failure a positive experience, take the lesson and leave the story behind as it is how you develop stronger wings. The only way to have stronger wings is to climb the ladder of success.
Don’t bet on the escalator. It breaks down quite often and requires regular maintenance.
Article by:
Joseph Wong, the behavioral transformation coach and chief leadership facilitator of TrainingGearAsia Pte Ltd. He is an author and thought-provoking professional speaker on topics of influence, leadership and change motivation. Email him at ignite@traininggearasia.com
