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Here’s a perspective from Chris Assaad I found interesting…

“Most people have a very negative association with the word “failure”. That one little word carries so much weight in our minds and it tends be loaded with so much meaning and negative energy. I call it the other F-word. Well, I’m going to come right out and say it: I’m a failure. There, I said it.

What many of us often forget or don’t realize is that the road to success is paved with many failures. What tends to happen to many of us is that somewhere along the way, we fail and we decide that we’re not going to get where we’re going so we give up. The irony of it is that what actually stops us from succeeding or reaching our goals is not failure itself, it’s how we respond to failure. It’s how we interpret our failures and what we make them mean. Things like: “I’m not good enough, I can’t do it, I’ll never be able to do X, Y or Z, I don’t deserve to have my dreams come true, to be in a loving relationship, to be successful…blah, blah, blah.” Sound familiar? Maybe not, because the voice that says these things is very sneaky. It shows up at our weakest moments and kicks us while we’re down or even worse still, it speaks up when we are so close to the finish line and tries to convince us to give up on a goal we’ve been working towards for so long.

Why is that? Well, it’s very simple. Many of us learned this distorted perception of failure at a young age and have carried it forward into our adult lives. We may have failed a test in school and were traumatized by the associated stigma. We may have liked someone in our adolescent years only to get our heart broken and decided never to express our feelings again. The examples are endless but the pattern is the same. We fail at something and we take that failure as conclusive evidence that we’re not worthy or capable of the thing we’re after, that it’s not going to happen and so we might as well give up. Right? Wrong! Continue reading “The ‘truth’ about failure…” →