Awaken the energy of success
“Failure is an opportunity to awaken our energy for success.”
The nature of leaders is that our inner dial is set for ‘success’. This metric differs for each of us, but if you are like me, this means you love a challenge, seek out opportunities to learn and grow, and have a strong competitive streak. Simply put – you like being on top of your game and building a brighter future for yourself and others.
These are all good traits for someone with the ambition to get to the top of their field, build a business of significance and live the life you dream of.
So when this dial swings around to ‘stumbling along’ or to ‘fail’ and we find that instead of our usual bounce out of bed, high five to the day attitude, we are reduced to going through the motions. We need tools to get back in the groove.
I had one of these periods recently, when everything I looked at in my life shouted “not good enough, pretty much a total failure”. It didn’t help that friends I confided in disagreed and tried to make me see myself differently.
In that moment, I felt like a failure, and it coloured my world in a dark energy.
This is the strategy I used to regain my balance, my love for life and the energy for success:
- Remind yourself that so too will this pass, as day follows night and night follows day. Hang onto that truth, even if you don’t believe it right now.
- Acknowledge how you feel. Accept it as your current state. Lean into the feeling.
- Join the dots across the different areas of your life to understand what happened to put you there. What happened in the past (even as far back as childhood) to colour this feeling?
- Now draw a line in the sand and place the past failures and disappointments behind the line. Make this line your start line
- Standing on the new start line, look up, revisit or redesign your vision for success and get ready for this new journey, taking all the experience and wisdom that the past has given you.
- Smile. Every day is the starting line to new experiences. Failure is the moment you decide to stop trying.
This exercise reminds us of our natural resilience and ability to flow through life’s ups and downs. It reminds us that failure is a flexible state of mind, not a cliff we fall off. It’s an invitation to see each day as an opportunity to awaken our energy for success.
