To succeed a person needs only four things. You can remember them by thinking of the word REAL.
Relationship: The greatest skill needed for success is the ability to get along with other people. It impacts every aspect of a person’s life. Your relationships make you or they break you.
Equipping : One of the most significant lessons I’ve learned is that those closest to you determine the level of your success. If your dreams are great, you achieve them only with a team.
Attitude: People’s attitudes determine how they approach life day to day. Your attitude, more than your aptitude, will determine your altitude.
Leadership: Everything rises and falls on leadership. If you desire to lift the lid on your personal effectiveness, the only way to do it is to increase your leadership skills.
The main difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure. Nothing else has the same kind of impact on people’s ability to achieve and to accomplish whatever their minds and heart desire.
Soccer player Kyle Rote Jr. remarked: ”There is no doubt in my mind that there are many ways to be a winner, but there is really only one way to be a loser and that is to fail and not look beyond failure”. How people see failure and deal with it-whether they possess the ability to look beyond it and keep achieving-impacts every aspect of their lives. Yet that ability seems difficult to acquire. Most people don’t know where to start looking to get it.
In Leadership Magazine, J. Wallace Hamilton states, “The increase of suicides, alcoholics, and even some forms of nervous breakdowns is evidence that many people are training for success when they should be training for failure. Failure is far more common than success: poverty is more prevalent than wealth; and disappointment more normal than arrival.”
Training for failure! That is a great concept because in life, the question is not if you will have problems, but how you are going to deal with your problems. Are you going to fail forward or backward?
One of the questions I used to hear from motivational speakers was this: “If the possibility of failure were erased, what would you attempt to achieve?” But then one day I realized that it was really a bad question. Why? Because it takes a person’s thinking down the wrong track. There is no achievement without failure. To even imply that it might be possible gives people the wrong impression. So here’s a better question: If your perception of and response to failure were changed, what would you attempt to achieve?
What does matter is that your life can change if you’re willing to look at failure differently. You have the potential to overcome any problems, mistakes, or misfortunes. All you have to do is learn to fail forward.
First step to failing forward:
Realize there is one major difference between average people and achieving people
Failing Backward:
-Blaming others
-Repeating the same mistakes
-Expecting never to fail again
-Expecting to continually fail
-Accepting tradition blindly
-Being limited by past mistakes
-Thinking I am a failure
-Quitting
Failing Forward:
-Taking responsibility
-Learning from each mistake
-Knowing failure is a part of progress
-Maintaining a positive attitude
-Challenging outdated assumptions
-Taking new risks
-Believing something didn’t work
-Persevering
One of the greatest problem people have with failure is that they are too quick to judge isolated situations in their lives and label them as failures. Instead, they need to keep the bigger picture in mind.
Seven things failure is not:
1 People think failure is avoidable-It’s not
Everybody fails, errs, and makes mistakes; if you’re a human being, you’re going to make mistakes.
Rules for being human:
Rule 1: You will learn lessons.
Rule 2: There are no mistakes-only lessons.
Rule 3: A lesson is repeated until it is learned.
Rule 4: If you don’t learn the easy lessons, they get harder. (Pain is one way the universe gets your attention.)
Rule 5: You’ll know you’ve learned a lesson when your actions change.
“The essence of man is imperfection.” Know that you’re going to make mistakes.
2. People think failure is an event-It’s not
Success is not a destination-not a place where you arrive one day. Instead, it is the journey you take. And whether you succeed comes from what you do day to day. In other words, success is a process.
Failure works the same way. It’s not someplace you arrive. Just as success is not an event, neither is failure. It’s how you deal with life along the way. No one can conclude that he has failed until he breathes his last breath. Until then, he’s still in process, and the jury is still out.
3. People think failure is objective-it’s not
You are the only person who can really label what you do a failure. It’s subjective.
Your perception of and response to your mistakes determine whether your actions are failures.
4. People think failure is the enemy-it’s not
“Failure is good, it’s fertilizer. Everything I’ve learned from making mistakes.” NBA coach Rick Pitino
“The fellow who never makes mistake takes his orders from one who does.” Herbert V.Brocknow
“When we give ourselves permission to fail, we at the same time give ourselves permission to excel” musicologist Eloise Ristad
5. People think failure is irreversible-it’s not
Mistakes are not irreversible. Keep everything in perspective. The problems come when you see only the spilled milk and not the bigger picture. People who correctly see failure take it in stride.
Every event-whether good or bad-is one small step in the process of living. Or as Tom Peters acknowledge, “If silly things were not done, intelligent things would never happen”.
6. People think failure is a stigma-it’s not
Mistakes are not permanent markers.
7. People think failure is final-it’s not
“Great minds have purposes; others have wishes. Little minds are subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them.” Washington Irving
The terrible truth is that all roads to achievement lead through the land of failure. It has stood firmly between every human being who had dream and the realization of that dream. The good news is that anyone can make it through failure. That’s why author Rob Parsons maintained that “tomorrow belongs to the failures.”
“Failure is really a matter of conceit. People don’t work hard because, in their conceit, they imagine they’ll succeed without ever making an effort. Most people believe that they’ll wake up some day and find themselves rich. Actually, they’ve got it half right, because eventually they do wake up.” Thomas Edison
Each of us has to make a choice. Are we going to sleep life away, avoiding failure at all costs? Or are we going to wake up and realize this: Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success.
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Thomas Edison
If you can change the way you see failure, you gain the strength to keep running the race.
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