This morning I want to talk a bit about failure and what failure does for you.

One of the things that failure gives you is it definitely builds your character.

You learn by your mistakes even if that learning is by learning which way not to go.

Unless you have a crystal ball, there’s no real way of knowing which direction is the best one to take.

We’re all in the same position.

We’re all testing and trying out new things in our lives, whether you’re bored and watching the same TV programme and you want to test out something new for you to watch.

It’s as simple as that.

We all get tired of eating the same food all the time.

Regardless of what part of your life it is, we are creatures of habit, but we also have to take it into account that change is going to happen.

Change happens regardless of what we do, so we do change.

Every time you fail, you learn something either about the direction not to go, or you learn something about yourself or something about the direction that you should be going.

There’s always an opportunity to be educated in failure.

Everybody fails, it is a part of the process.

It’s not be all and end all.

You shouldn’t just go ‘well, that’s it, I’ve failed. That’s the end. There’s no point of me trying because every time I try, I fail’.

That’s the nature of the beast, unfortunately.

Unless you’re super lucky and you come across the ideal situation in your first attempt at doing something.

Most of us aren’t like that, we have to try and try and keep going and failing and trying and failing until eventually we try something and we have success.

Sometimes the success might not stick.

I am talking about failure in quitting drinking but hopefully…

This process is about moving away from what you don’t want and moving towards what you do want.

Stop focusing on the problem and start focusing on the solution to the problem.

Once you keep doing that, you’re focusing on the things that are going to improve your life.

As you go through this failure, you have to realise that every failure represents an opportunity to learn something, whether it’s learning which direction you should or shouldn’t take, whether it’s learning something about yourself, your abilities, your capabilities, learning something about the people around you, learning about what you’re not good at, about situations in your life that you need to build.

It builds courage as well.

When you keep pushing forward and you keep doing the same thing regardless of what happens whether you fail or not, and you try it a little differently the next time.

Obviously if you fail and you stand back up and you try and do things exactly the same way again, it means you haven’t learned anything yet.

All education is about behaviour change, all learning is about behaviour change.

If your behaviour hasn’t changed then you definitely haven’t learned anything and that’s the whole point.

You’re trying to progress yourself, and if you get back up and try and do it the same way again…

I think it was Einstein that said

you can’t solve a problem by tackling it with the same state of mind as you caused the problem.

It’s the same thing here, you can’t go backwards and do things in the same way you failed, standing back up and doing the same things and hoping for a different outcome, that’s not going to happen.

You have to get up and think what went wrong, and try again.

And that builds your courage and confidence in yourself.

It’s all perspective.

You have to look at failure from a different perspective, it’s not a failure it’s just a diversion.

You’ve tried something new.

Edison said that each light bulb that failed was one that he didn’t ever have to try again, it got struck off.

He knew that if he kept trying and trying, he would get to the light bulb that worked.

And he did, and changed history.

It’s the same with your personal life; if you try something and it fails, you get up, think about it, make a little change in what you’re doing, and then try again.

And every time you do this, you make yourself a little bit stronger, and you get yourself a little bit further towards your goals, and the person you want to be.

It’s the same for quitting drinking and moving yourself towards your new goals.

Quitting drinking is over in one second, I keep saying this over and over again.

Regardless of what way you look at this, the drinking is not the problem, it’s the lifestyle that you built up around your drinking that’s the problem.

So, if you quit drinking and keep going back to the same pubs that you were going to, and try and lead the same lifestyle that you were leading before, then you’re going to go back into that cycle.

It’s a thing called habit, gravity: when you see a space shuttle going up, it takes so much power to get that space shuttle out of the gravitational pull of the earth, and hen once it’s out there, it maintains that speed that it’s going at because there’s nothing to hold it back.

You can push forwards and the velocity is already there.

It’s the same thing with your habits.

It takes a lot of energy in the first days and weeks, the first couple of weeks especially, and then gradually decreases the amount of energy that you have to put into this.

It is hat habit, that gravity that’s pulling you back.

Now you add to that gravity by staying with people who are drinking or encouraging you to drink, going to the same environments that are causing you to drink, thinking the same things that are causing you to drink, all this kind of stuff.

You escape that, you change that by changing the underlying, changing what’s going on underneath.

Changing all the environment and the people stuff.

You don’t have to get rid of everyone, you just have to sort of put them to one side while you deal with yourself, while you help yourself.

That’s the whole point of this.

But failure definitely brings courage because once you stand up and try again, and say ‘I’m refusing to stop, this is just a stepping stone in my journey, this is part of a natural process’.

Then, because you’re looking at it this way, you’re basically building an internal courage, building a resilience to failure. You see things differently.

Another part of going through this while process of trying something and it not working and trying something else and it not working, it sort of builds your creativity muscles and encourages you to experiment and try new things, because you have to sort of think about this.

You have to think ‘shit, that didn’t work so what am I going to try now?’ whatever it is you’re doing and hopefully it’s your goal that you’re aiming towards…short term or long term goal, you have a goal that is mutually exclusive with alcohol, they don’t work together.

So you either go towards the goal or you go back to the alcohol.

That’s basically the whole stuff.

You want a goal which is strong enough to pull you away from the alcohol, that’s got a stronger pull than alcohol has got a backward pull.

When you’re going through these iterations of trying something and it not working and trying something else and it not working, you have to get a bit creative.

There’s three areas to this whole cycle of trying different things that aren’t working out; you learn a lot about the whole process, about yourself, about the journey, where you want to go.

Maybe you learn a lot about your end goals, do you want to tweak them, do you want to break the goal that you’re heading towards into a couple to smaller goals, think about this stuff.

It also teaches you courage, builds courage inside you because every time you get up and try again, you’re not giving in.

when you push forward, you gain more confidence in yourself.

And it encourages experimentation.

It gets you to think creatively about yourself.

The more creatively you can think about yourself, the easier it’s going to be to think creatively in the future, to have courage to experiment, to learn more, it’s all a big cycle.

Don’t look at failure as a bad thing.

Failure is a good thing.

Failure is a good thing in your life.

It builds forward momentum.

It’s what all success is made of.

All successful people have to go through the same thing, so don’t take it personally don’t gie up, don’t think that a failure makes youa failure becaue it doesn’t.

Failure is what it is, you tried something and it didn’t work, we all go through it.

If you have any questions at all, leave them down below.

Come on over to the website if you want a free course on relaxation and de-stressing, then sign up for the newsletter.

This is one of the videos I’m going through now which is part of the 365 videos that I’m doing this year. One everyday.

Until next time, keep positive, keep those failures in perspective.

Remember that each failure is just a step in the process, a step in the right direction.

Every time you fail it’s leading you down a better road, it’s pointing something out which is not working, and you make a little change and go forward from there.

FAILURE IS ONLY THE OPPORTUNITY TO BEGIN AGAIN, ONLY THIS TIME MORE WISELY.

Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!

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