” Failure is an option. It’s what you do with this failure that makes you who you are. Our failures mold us. I have failed at several things in my life. What sets some of us apart, is that when we fail, we can’t sleep at night. It haunts us until we have our time at redemption.”
– David Goggins
Today, I talk about failure and why it is part of the journey toward self mastery. How do we feel when we slip back into patterns we know to be wrong? What’s the best way to handle this shame and guilt? How do you move on from it?
- The fact that your NOT perfect is perfect. It is part of the journey.
- Improvement of yourself ALWAYS comes with failure. It has to. To get better at anything, you have to start from grade one. First, you have to notice a behaviour/pattern within yourself that you would like to change. And that comes with honesty, which is always difficult to face. As you move into this new behaviour, your unconscious programming goes ERROR, this is not the usual program. This is the ego. The mind want to conserve as much mental energy as it can and continue with what’s already familiar. So any change comes with resistance.
- Stumbling forward is what’s REQUIRED to grow. You should not settle in the same boat of suffering. If you stumble forward by learning and changing your routine by 1% each day, you will be so much further from the boat in 1 month. Could you imagine 1 year?
- So now your very disciplined, you are on a strict diet, you have your morning routine, and you have been sacrificing old destructive habits. But then, you FALL BACK into an old habit your trying to break. First, I bet you that your awareness of this failure will contain much self punishment. You have worked too hard to go one week without a cigarette and now something within you took over. It is typical to think that you are not who you thought you were. You bypassed any rational voice that said don’t smoke and went right to the impulse.
- Failure is important because it serves as an orientation mechanism. You feel the GUILT and SHAME afterwards. It sucks when you could not control the actions of yourself. So you feel pain. That pain is important because the more pain you attach to the behaviour, the more you will move away from it. I’ve seen with my clients, they would fail less and less often as they moved forward because of the painful feedback they received each time they failed. This unconscious program needs to be chipped away over time. It cannot break after just 1 week.
- Neuropathways are changeable BUT you need to put the sword into the fire dozens of times and hammer it before it becomes the intended strong weapon that it needs to be.
- Failure is not falling down but REFUSING to get up.