Quite often, I am asked how I could deal with so much failure in my life and learn not to take it personally. I was $135,000 in dept, a single mother; I endured fires, floods, riots, earthquakes, a nasty divorce, a lawsuit – and the hits just kept coming and coming. It has everything in the world to do with my mindset and how I choose to look at failure.
Failure Is Not Failure
Things are going to happen in your life, really tough things, and your reaction is likely to think that it feels like failure. When these overwhelming events occur, many people look at the situation and think of themselves as complete and utter failures. It becomes difficult to see anything other than the bad things going on, and you just can’t seem to figure anything out. My advice to my private clients and anyone I speak with is to stop viewing failure as failure and see it for what it really is – a map.
Use Failure As A Road Sign
Instead of viewing failure as an adverse event, reframe it as a huge stop sign saying, “Don’t go here!” The failure is actually lighting your path in a new direction. When you learn to shift your perception from viewing yourself as a failure who keeps making mistakes to a mindset of eliminating a particular path, you can begin to appreciate failure as a process for crossing items off of a list and looking for a new route.
Find A New Route
Begin to view failure like you view a faulty route on an outdated GPS. You know, that feeling when you are trying to reach a location, and there is construction that your system does not recognize — you can see the building, but you can’t get to it? Instead of reaching your location, you somehow end up in a cul de sac, and you have to figure out how to get where you want to go using another route. You don’t hop out of your car, throw a tantrum and begin to declare yourself a loser and an idiot. You stop and realize something has changed, and you start planning another route. If you take a couple of new turns, the GPS can always reroute you to get to your destination.
This is the exact way you must begin looking at failure. You find a route that is not going to work and use it as a big sign saying that you can get there, but you will have to take a different course — shift failure from a negative emotion into a learning opportunity that is navigating you toward your ultimate destination.
At the Growth Architect, your growth is at the height of importance, and our goal is to help you reach your full potential. If you want to learn from someone that doesn’t just give resilience lip service, but has lived a life that required it, then join me at The Growth Architect and watch my video on not taking failure personally.
Let’s grow!
Beate
Beate Chelette is The Growth Architect & Founder of The Women’s Code, a training company specialized in providing companies an ROI on Balanced Leadership. She has been named one of 50 must-follow women entrepreneurs by the Huffington Post. A first-generation immigrant who found herself $135,000 in debt as a single parent, she bootstrapped her passion for photography into a highly successful global business and eventually sold it to Bill Gates in a multimillion-dollar deal.
Beate works with business leaders and supports organizations by developing and providing training the training, tools, and expertise to create and maintain a balanced, equal, and inclusive work environment that fosters creativity, employee engagement, and corporate growth.
Recent clients include Merck, Women’s Legislative Caucus of California, Cal State University Dominguez Hills, Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), NFTE, CreativeLive, the Association of Corporate Growth, and TracyLocke.
Beate is the author of the #1 International Amazon Bestseller “Happy Woman Happy World – How to Go From Overwhelmed to Awesome” a book that corporate trainer and best-selling author Brian Tracy calls “a handbook for every woman who wants health, success and a fulfilling career.
To book Beate to speak or train please connect here. Your Time Is Valuable!