The Chic Creative

MY DEEPEST APOLOGIES! It appears Week 10 did not show up Monday when published!

So while it’s a couple of days late I do hope it inspires and challenges you to rethink the way you see failure.

One of my favorite books is by John Maxwell entitled Sometime You Win Sometimes You Learn. 

He writes “Ninety percent of those who fail are not actually defeated; they simply quit. . . As you face bad experiences, it’s important for you to remember that you can rarely see the benefits while you are in the midst of them.  You usually gain perspective on the other side of it”

I have yet to meet a woman who has never failed.   

I have met plenty who never try because of their fear of failure and I’ve been one of them.

For years I refused to set goals because I feared failing at them.  

Fear of failure keeps us from trying or when when we try and we do fail, we slap a label on our forehead of “Failure” and quit altogether. 

Failure is only failure when we fail to learn from the experience otherwise it’s no longer failure but a lesson learned. 

The woman who experiences failure repeatedly is NOT a failure.  

She simply hasn’t yet learned the lesson the experience is trying to teach her because if and when she does she won’t repeat the failure. 

Failure can reveal patterns and encourage new ways of thinking that will eventually lead to success.

Choosing to believe that failing makes us failures robs us of our power.  

For example, when we make multiple attempts and fail to lose weight quickly either through starvation or fad diets but never learn that both are temporary fixes and not a lasting solution to our weight issue, then we will continue the vicious dieting cycle.  

But once we figure out that starvation/fad diet plan is never going to work, then we are free to move forward and find a more effective, long lasting weight loss program. 

Failures are simply learning opportunities that open the door to rapid growth.  

So today we stop wasting precious time and emotional energy beating ourselves up choosing instead to seek the lesson and move on. 

A surefire to get and stay stuck is to spend years berating ourselves up over past failures.

We are not failures. 

We are students in the classroom of life and those who ace the class are those who quickly from their mistakes and move on never defining themselves by their failures.  

G.K. Chesterton said “How we think when we lose determines how long it will be until we win.” 

So, if you are ready to win then begin today by changing the way you view failure.  

You’ve failed.  I’ve failed .  But we are not failures. We are learning as we go from every experience all the lessons we need to succeed. 

Changing the way you view failure changes everything. 

Sandra Hubbard