I often say that the tower of my success is built on the sands of my failures. This means that I understand that any success I enjoy is temporary and can only be judged by what I had to do to accomplish it. Depending on the lens that it is viewed through, success and failure can mean different things.
Whatever it means for you, you worked for it, and through some challenges and maybe some failures, you accomplished your worthy endeavor. You could say that it is not a failure until you quit trying. You could say that there is no failure, only different ways to prove something doesn’t work. You could say that no one likes failure.
Failure, like anything else in life, is a perception. We often see people who are doing well, achieving their goals and living their epic life. Maybe we think it’s easy for them because we see the end result. Unless we are with them every step of the way we don’t see their struggles. We don’t see the failures that their tower of success has been built on. If we do see, maybe we don’t hear the internal dialogue. Yes, we all have it and the default setting is toward the negative and like anything else, what we feed grows and thrives.
Negative self-talk can be considered a form of failure, so why not welcome it, acknowledge it and realize that there is another way to perceive situations, then let it go. It takes practice. A negative mindset is not overcome overnight. Sometimes we see challenges as failures and the negative self-talk begins. Before you know it you feel like a failure and you want to give up. Remember that the default setting is negative and the cycle can be broken.
Keep in mind that whatever you perceive to be true is true. If you believe you’ve failed, you have. If you believe that failure is only a perception, a stepping stone on the path to success, then you are already successful. Please help me keep this in mind when I become doubtful of my own success.
G A ZUBIA 