How You Can Learn From Failure

Remind yourself that you are good enough. Leo Babauta suggests that not believing we are good enough rests at the heart of fearing failure. Failures serve as proof of this greatest fear, causing us to want to withdraw and not try again for fear of being further exposed as inadequate and incapable. However, this fear is not founded in reality; nobody is perfect and everyone will err at various points in life. The real difference between people who become successful and overcome failure and those who do not comes down to how you manage failure and how you view its impact on you. Feeling inadequate is a commonplace human feeling that even very public, very successful people feel but they don't let it keep them down. You are good enough; all you need is to give yourself the go-ahead to keep trying.

 Embed these quotes into your life as affirmations whenever you feel tempted to give up. 

“I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.”
George Burns

“I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.”
Tony Robbins

“You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Wayne Gretzky

“Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.”
Coco Chanel

“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.”
George Edward Woodberry

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”
Johnny Cash

“Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.”
Denis Waitley

“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”
Vincent van Gogh

“I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don’t mind the failure but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try.”
Nikki Giovanni

“No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.”
Napoleon Hill

“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
Theodore Roosevelt

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

“There is no failure except in no longer trying.”
Elbert Hubbard

“Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.”
James A. Froude

“A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.”
Ambrose Bierce

“Don’t be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.”
Lily Tomlin

“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
Michael Jordan

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
Confucius

“Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not.”
Virgil Thomson

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
Steve Jobs

“Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.”
Mia Hamm

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
Andre Gide

 

 

Living Fearlessly and Being Courageous: What Does That Mean? Martha Pasternack

 

Living fearlessly is not about being tougher than the next guy, or being immune to feeling afraid in the grips of a perceived danger, or feeling overly confident in the presence of the unknown. It is not about overcoming fear, either. It is more about befriending fear and loving yourself just the way you are, really.

Living fearlessly is also about being courageous. It is about being fearlessly courageous. Courageous. Courage. What is courage?

Let's go to my computer's dictionary and see what it says about courage. It says that courage is "the ability to do something that frightens one." Courage is "having strength in the face of pain or grief."

Courage is the ability to act on one's beliefs despite danger or disapproval. Courage is also called daring, audacity, boldness, grit, true grit, hardihood, heroism, and gallantry, among other things. Wow.

Now we know what the dictionary says, but what is the lived experience of being courageous?

The first time I was intellectually introduced to the origin of the word "courage" was in the summer of 1976. I was a 23-year-old on a Hurricane Island Outward Bound course.

The mysterious and mighty waters of Penobscot Bay and the tidal rivers of midcoast Maine were my training ground. My group was called a "mobile watch," which meant we travelled from island to island and river to river rather than being stationed on Hurricane Island itself. We were never indoors the entire month. I was immersed in the natural world and I was never happier or more scared.

During the course I learned many things that guide me still. I learned that the word "courage" had roots in old French: coeur ("heart"), from the Latin word for heart, cor.

So, therefore, to have courage meant moving from my heart in the face of being afraid, and I was often afraid. Prior to that, I thought of courage merely as bravery and believed that one needed to be big and strong to be brave.

Well, I wasn't big and strong. In fact, I felt pretty tiny in the marine wilderness. Yet I was humbly calling for courage daily as I was challenged to complete our tasks. I have shared some of them here: maneuvering an outdoors ropes course, jumping off a pier into the cold Atlantic, rapelling granite cliffs at the ocean's edge in Acadia National Park, weathering powerful rainstorms in a 26-foot open pulling boat (a row boat), and being physically, emotionally and spiritually vulnerable with strangers.

Trusting strangers with my life was the most challenging by far. Yet I found my personal courage to do these things as I mastered the fear that tried to stop me.

Since 1976, life has offered me countless opportunities to practice being courageous, and I confess that I don't always find my courage. In fact, I am still learning about it every day.

Today, whenever I am curious and want to understand courage more deeply, all I have to do is go outside and turn to the natural world all around me.

There, I see the baby bird stepping off the edge of the nest to fly, because that is what chicks do -- they find the courage to fly.

I see the seed surviving drought and sprouting after the summer monsoons finally arrive, because that is what seeds do -- they find the courage to sprout.

I watch the ducklings following their mother downriver without thought of where she might be leading them, because that is what ducklings do -- they find the courage to float downriver, following their mother.

I see the cottonwoods bend with the fierce wind that precedes the thunderstorm, because that is what cottonwoods do -- they find the courage to yield to a power greater than themselves in the moment.

I see the willows growing again after being trimmed back, simply because that is what willows do -- they find the courage to grow again.

I see the chipmunk pup emerging from the underground sanctuary called his nest for the first time, because that is what chipmunk pups do -- they find the courage to pop out of their nests and run around.

I see the goslings take flight and practice the V formation in preparation for a long migration south come autumn, because that is what geese do -- they find the courage to go south.

I see the doe with her fawn crossing the river in search of new tender leaves, fully exposing herself and her baby to predation, because that is what deer do -- they find the courage to risk their lives and munch everything they can munch to fatten up for winter.

I see a tree that grows from a barren and cracked rock sucking nutrients from imperceptible soil, because that is what trees do -- they find the courage to defy the impossible and reach for the sun.

How about the first day of school for the kindergartner, or the first steps taken by the infant-soon-to-be-toddler? That is just what they do -- they find the courage to grow up.

The modeling of courage in nature is an endless stream of purposeful and courageous action that offers lessons on the lived experience of courage every day and every night.

But don't believe me. Go out into nature and see for yourself. Go with courage. Go with confidence. Go with discernment. And as Rhonda Britten would say, be fearless.

via huffingtonpost.com

 

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The Antidote For Fear: Dr. Gordon Livingston

Hopelessness is the ultimate failure of imagination. The most prosaic form of courage is a willingness to get out of bed each morning and continue our lives. In the face of work that does not inspire us, relationships that have become stale and weighted with failed expectations, a world that little resembles the dreams of our youth, most of us choose to go on. What gives us hope that things will change for the better?

This is the essential issue in psychotherapy (definition: conversation directed at change) and is expressed in a more succinct question with which I confront patients: What’s next? We waste a lot of time thinking about the past, or that version of it that we choose to explain the present. I was at a golf driving range recently and forced to listen to two men in their sixties who had just discovered that they had grown up in the same city. They were caught up in reminiscences about acquaintances, athletic teammates, and various local luminaries whom they both knew when they were young. Woven into the conversation were accounts of their own athletic prowess in high school. The ubiquity of cellphones has made all of us routinely privy to information about the lives of strangers that we could do without, but I was especially struck by the sadness implied in these (augmented) memories of a time when everything seemed possible and football heroes would never be old men practicing a game they could never play well.

We frequently talk about the importance of hope without specifying what it is that we are hoping for. For hope to be genuine it must be realistic; otherwise it is but a dream. Visualize the long lines that form at lottery outlets when the payoff reaches hundreds of millions of dollars. My state lottery has as its motto “You’ve got to play to win.” A more realistic slogan would be “You’ve got to play to lose.” It is obviously hope that impels people to stand in those lines while discussing how they will spend the money. The problem is that this hope is undone by odds that make it unrealistic and cause many to spend money they cannot afford. The hope for miracles also provides fertile ground for those who would sell us cancer cures, effortless weight loss programs, real estate with no money down, “natural” remedies, untold wealth from Nigeria, or shortcuts to finding the perfect mate. People (other than self-help authors) don’t get rich advocating perseverance, loyalty, or years of education. Where’s the fun in that?

We are in love with new ideas, the big score, the sudden transformation. We ignore a fundamental truth: Only bad things happen quickly. Why do most kids hate school? Why is the slow acquisition of knowledge “boring?” Why do we appear to have such short historical memories? Why does the stock market, driven by fear and greed, oscillate so wildly and unpredictably, exactly like one’s bankroll in a Las Vegas casino? All these things occur because we are distracted from the real purpose of our lives by a dream of effortless success, narrowly defined in our culture as the accumulation of worldly goods. In the face of the greatest disparity between rich and middle class (not to mention poor) in our history, we now have one of our two major political parties devoted primarily to the interests of our wealthiest citizens. The core concept of capitalism, that we can all prosper together, has given way to a kind of societal selfishness that is an invitation to class conflict based on envy and a sense of unfairness. An expression of and outlet for the longing to be rich is the false idea that it could, with a little luck, happen to any of us.

What is lost in such fragile hopes is the concept of pride in our work, the satisfaction that comes with doing our jobs well in the knowledge that we can construct a comfortable, if not extravagant, life as a result of our labors. Stalked by recession, unemployment, home foreclosures, stagnating income, jobs moving overseas, and endless warfare it is easy to grow angry and cynical. When this anger is re-directed at minorities - immigrants, gay people, government workers – we are in danger of becoming fragmented along the lines of race and class, prisoners of our fear that there is not enough to go around and that we must each act in our own economic interest. This is a formula for relinquishing the central idea of the society, interdependence: that we are all in this together and that we will succeed or fail based on our ability to hear heartbeats other than our own. This idea is where our best hopes reside.

If everything that is worthwhile in this life – education, loving relationships, occupational skill, the development of civic virtue – requires sustained effort, then who will teach us to let go of the idea of instant gratification? The degree to which we covet the latest electronic gadget bodes ill for this effort. Are the thoughts being shared on a $500 iPhone any more compelling than those we used to write down and put in a mailbox? Have you read anything significant on Twitter recently? How many Facebook friends do you have? How many of them could you count on for help at 3am?

To face the future with courage we must believe that we have the power, the resolve, the tolerance to contribute to a world that we and our children will want to live in. As a nation we have things of which we can be proud and those of which we ought to be ashamed. To get where we want to go, we must have at least general agreement on where we have been. We need, in other words, to know our history. Our forbears created a system of democratic government that has been a beacon to all who would live in freedom. They also tolerated slavery. We won the wars, hot and cold, against Fascism and Communism. We also interned our fellow citizens based on their race. We think of ourselves as peace-loving while spending more on, and using, our military than all other nations combined. We elected a black president but discrimination against others for inborn circumstances like race, sexual orientation, and national origin persists. We may be “exceptional” but, like all humans, we are fallible and given to the conceit of those who have easier lives than most of mankind.

In my work I sell hope in individual doses. I listen to people’s stories, question their fundamental beliefs about themselves, and try to help them identify and change those parts of their lives that are keeping them from being happy or fulfilled. My view of how people in groups see themselves and each other is informed by my belief that much of what we think we know is untrue and most of our behavior is driven by desires and motives of which we are only dimly aware. I also believe that insight, generosity, and tolerance are not inborn traits and can be taught. We just have to identify those among us who are qualified to lead and teach us. They must be intelligent and devoted to the principles of kindness and hope. If, instead, we elevate those who are stupid or arrogant (or both) we will then get the future we deserve. via psychologytoday.com

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 A respected life strategist, Jim is both inspired and inspiring with a pin point ability to see through to the core of the issues at hand and to address them straight on. It is his instinct and intuition, honed over 25 years of consulting and coaching private clients, that truly sets him apart. Jim’s spirit and delivery are impeccably delivered in a no nonsense manner resulting in maximum results.    

Jim’s passion for overcoming emotional fears was born of personal tragedy. He lived in his car following the divorce of his marriage of 30 years. In overcoming the legacy of this terrifying life stopping experience, Jim developed the principles and resources that he would later use to heal himself and so many others. 

Today, Jim is a management consultant and speaker to leading companies. His past clients are: Whirlpool Corporation, MITRE and Lush Cosmetics. To have Jim speak to your organization or work with you privately contact him at 719-649-4118 or email.