No one wants to fail; even admitting failure can be painful. What if we stopped looking at failure as necessarily negative? Instead of viewing failure as the barrier, we must see our failures as building blocks, with which you can choose to build your staircase to success.
Ask yourself: how can you possibility be good at something right off the bat? Excellence is almost always gained through experience. Experience comes through practice – you must take time to learn and understand tasks before you proceed to competence. After a while and with enough experience, you can achieve mastery. Even masters make mistakes, from which they gain awareness and insight and, if reflected upon and learned from, then you can finally reach excellence.
Every successful inventor experiences their fair share of trial and error before they created something incredible. With every error, they gain knowledge about their craft. Instead of doubting themselves, they continue trying because you only truly fail if you give up. When failure arrives, it takes a little work to avoid getting caught up in disappointment. This brings attention to the falls that occur while we attempt to build our staircase to success and how to develop the positive perspective about failure (as it occurs).
Dr. Julie Exline, a Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, explains that when the falls do happen, we must be graceful. After a failure, what are you going to choose to remember? The lessons learned from failures or how you felt embarrassed and defeated during the occurrence?
There is no down side to failure as long as you learn from it and do not repeat your mistakes. If you do not learn from your mistakes – how can you not keep repeating them? With every lesson, you fail a little less until you reach your goal; that is the process and there is no way of getting around it – no matter what anyone tells you.
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