Earlier this year I went on a 7-day cruise. As you can imagine, I was looking forward to some sun, fun, and adventure. Who doesn’t love being in a tropical paradise?
So, when I woke up the day of the trip and didn’t feel good, I hoped it would pass quickly.
It didn’t.
In fact, I didn’t feel like myself again until the night before we returned home. The rest of the time was spent sleeping. And even if it’s on a deck chair in the sun, it’s still sleeping.
It would have been easy to ask, “Why me?” or “Why did I have to spend all that money only to stay on the ship and sleep for the entire trip?” Many people would have considered the cruise a complete failure.
I would have liked things to have gone differently, but the simple truth is that I needed the rest. I’d done some major internal work during the weeks before boarding the ship, and getting sick was a way for my body to transform to a different expression. It was a healing crisis, and although the trip didn’t go as planned, I did come home rejuvenated.
Failure Isn’t Permanent
Failure gets a bad rap. But failure isn’t a mistake or something that happens to you. It’s part of the learning process and is often necessary to get the ultimate end result you want.
Flip It
The next time you feel like something you did or wanted failed, don’t judge it. When you judge, fear gets attached to the process.
Fear causes you to doubt yourself. You get less relaxed, less sure of yourself, and more likely to start flailing about like a drowning person. And just like for a drowning person, it only makes things worse.
So, relax. Take a breath. Have the courage to accept failure as part of the process. Know that failing doesn’t mean that YOU are a failure.
Failing simply means you’re learning important things about yourself that will lead you from where you currently are to success. The reason something didn’t go as planned will become apparent later if you can flip failure from the negative picture you’re used to into a symptom of growth and progress.
If It Repeats All The Time
If you feel like you’re experiencing the same failure over and over, that’s different. It still doesn’t mean that you’re a failure. Instead, it’s a strong indicator that you have a limiting belief at work in your life.
It takes more than patience to get past a limiting belief. The belief needs to be found and rewritten so that you can get off the same shit different day rollercoaster for good and move on with your life.
That process is more than I can go into in a single post. However, if you read the above and realized that a limiting belief is at play for you, there are a few ways you can address it.
- Look at your life and see if you can tell what the common theme or belief is for the failures that repeat. Sometimes recognizing it will give you the perspective you need to rewrite it.
- If you can’t see it or rewrite it, my book, Same Shit Different Day can help you find and work through some of the most common limiting beliefs.
- If you want faster results, click here and sign up for a discovery session.