The voices in our heads can be horribly mean: “You are failing as a mother. You not a good wife. You are a lousy daughter. You are a bad friend. You are a bad manager. That was a dumb thing to do. You sounded stupid in that last meeting. You didn’t complete your work AND you’re going to be late to the parent-teacher meeting. You have bad judgment, you make bad decisions. Your house is a disaster. Your health sucks. You are too fat. You don’t make enough money. Your kids are badly behaved and it’s all your fault. Your cardio needs improvement. You have no grit. You can’t do anything well! You are a complete disaster!” The spiral can happen pretty quickly and it’s a brutal if the other side of our brains don’t step up quickly enough to combat those bullies. Lack of sleep and high expectations are not a good combination (am I right, new moms?)…
On the other hand, the celebration of success is entrenched in everything that we do, every Olympics, every career promotion, every project, every election… What we don’t see is how hard those winners worked, how often they failed and how difficult it was for them to motivate themselves beyond the last fall or broken bone.
So how do we adjust our thoughts when we are bullying ourselves just at a time when we need to be encouraging ourselves to keep going? Apparently the secret is to accept that failure is an integral process of succeeding. Let’s hear from a few famous people, you know… famous for their many successes:
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.” – Confucius
“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan
“Failure provides the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.” – Henry Ford
“I don’t believe I have special talents, I have persistence … After the first failure, second failure, third failure, I kept trying.” – Carol Rubbia
“There is something to be said for keeping at a thing, isn’t there?” – Frank Sinatra
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” – Bill Gates
Failure has to be BUILT in to the process! It is actually a part of learning, improving, growing, developing… it is on the path to the success. Success doesn’t happen without failure! If we stopped riding our bikes as soon as we fell off because we defined ourselves as a failure… then we fail to learn how to ride a bike. If we define the falling off as a failure to get the balance right, then get back on, figure out how to adjust the balance… then we learn how to ride a bike. If we said “I’m not good at math” because we got some answers wrong, then we will be bad at math. If we define getting the answer wrong as failure to get that answer right, but then asked about how to get it right and figured out where we went wrong… well, then we will learn how to get better at math!
So I hope you join me as we get back on the horse, get back on the bike and get up after each fall. Never say die. Just do it. Try and try again. I’ll be back! We start where we start!
Like my pretzels… after a few tries, they are looking a LOT better than they did when I started out!
Sherry Yuan Hunter 