Failure: A Changed Mindset

In writing my post for this month, I like to begin in the prior month and ‘channel’ a few residual thoughts from my just completed post.  I note areas that I didn’t include but are of interest to me at that time and this gives me a little creative loop.

(Note on the image for this post: When I was selecting my featured image for this post, I searched for a picture to denote “failure.”  I thought that the “shame” image was very telling on how our society perceives failure as, perhaps, something to be ashamed of?  Isn’t that interesting?  It is my goal with this post to change our view of failure into something more positive. I hope you continue reading.)

The following were my hastily typed notes from last month and in reviewing these notes I found them to resonate for me in December. Here they are:

Changed my mind about a few things…this came to me by inspired thinking

1.) We must break before we can build

2.) Trusting our own personal timing and ‘flow’

3.) Make decisions from an ‘abundance’ mindset

4.) The importance of sincerely seeing the beauty in ourselves first

This month, I did follow this guidance in my personal life and struggles to improve my feeling of health.  In my weight loss journey, I began to feel very restricted which began as a physical sensation and evolved into a mental frame of thinking.  With the surge of COVID-19 in the Northeast, we began to once again be isolating into a quarantine.  This external driver created another internal loop of my normal behavior to ‘cope’.  Instead of using this coping mechanism, however, I elected to choose a different path: Self-love.  I listened to myself, considered my known situation, and gave in to the removal of perceived restrictive behavior.  Because I gave myself the Grace to be in the moment, I turned a corner in how I viewed my personal journey.  This decision reflected #4.  I saw myself as a person, not as a thing to be belittled.  I spoke to myself as I would a friend, not an enemy.  This is how I gave myself ‘Grace’ or a higher feeling of love than I had ever known before.  My decision considered #3, my abundance mindset, because I saw the entire journey to health as a journey, not a destination. I considered everything that I have in life and was so grateful to actually have this struggle because there are so many struggles that could be considered worse.

I began to see the significance of the timing of my struggle which ticked my #2 idea.  The timing of the holiday season could not be denied and was key to my understanding of how I wish to achieve my health goals.  Everything in our lives is timing; I am beginning to see timing as my Divine guidance and have begun to be more of an observer of life and letting things ‘flow’ from me and not necessarily ‘to’ me.  I’d like to live life more like thinking that “the ‘to'” is taken care of already by what I put out to the world.  I finally realized that I can only control my behaviors in the moment which stem from my beliefs.  Our beliefs are extremely important to mentagility so I’m very cognizant of how they originate … and my interpretation of them.

This leads me to #1:  We must break before we can build.  When I discuss ‘break’ in this sense, it is not a literally breaking of things or of self.  It is more of a breaking of beliefs that no longer serve me.  It is my judgement to what serves me which is why it is important that our judgment be free of bias or the “trappings of life”.  When I have a belief that does not feel good, I really began to examine the belief from a few different perspectives – mainly, internal and external.  What internal measures am I consciously or unconsciously using? What are the external factors?  I review these areas without emotion so that I can more scientifically assess them.

If I have an emotion within the belief as I did in my recent struggle, that emotion is to be addressed first so that I can better understand the cue that life has given me.  Emotions are neither good nor bad; they are cues to my personal beliefs about a given situation, both known and unknown.  This unraveling of your emotions takes time which we may believe we don’t have.  (That is also a belief that is based on your behavior, isn’t it?)  We actually do have time because, Dear Reader, this is the reason we are living.  It is not doing a job and earning a good salary.  Nor, is our purpose to necessarily being a good parent.  Those roles and purposes are trappings of our lives and where or how we grew up.  We are all in our personal situations as a type of classroom where we can learn.  Classrooms take all shapes and sizes, interactions and events.  I believe that as long as we realize that there is a benefit in all things, we can actually begin to see the positive which helps to give a certain belief and begins the rebuilding process.

Here’s the thing.  I’ve tried this journey before and have failed at one point or another.  Rather than learn from ‘the’ past failures before, I berated myself for them and, thus, doomed myself to repeat them in one form or another.  By accepting failure as an example of what isn’t working – and de-personalizing the failure – I’m creating a healthier ‘me’ in the long run because I no longer focus on what happened but on the lessons I learned as a result.  It is our belief or perspective that helps us see past the emotions and understand and accept these failures so we can continue to learn.  And, in that, a failure isn’t anything other than a missed cue or a needed change in one’s perspective. Peace, and may you, too, fail in your goals so that you can learn more about yourself in the journey.

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert F. Kennedy