FranklinCovey Blog

I think my personal experience of a monumental failure in a particular job I took was a major learning. It was the first time in a successful career of being sought out and appreciated that I didn’t fit. My personal life was also pretty dire at the same time! For me, looking back, it was a fantastic opportunity to completely view how I defined myself. It was the beginning of a jouney to a much more peacful place and a new career in coaching.

I recommend failures, and it may be helpful to refer to them as mistakes even if they are whoppers! I found Nikki De Carteret’s book “Soul Power” very reassuring at this point. She, as an intelligent and experienced worman, had also “failed” in a job. It’s not until we loose something close that we realise how closely we relied on it to define us – to our detriment. Keep on failing – just make them new ones when you do.

This is very true! As a marriage educator this is especially true in marriage and divorce. First marriages have a 45% divorce rate, but 2nd marriages the divorce rate goes up to 65%. People who don’t learn what their spouse and their marriage meant to teach them may get a new package, but it will still have the same opportunities/requirements to learn and grow. (Plus a lot of collateral damage when children are involved.)

I work to help people learn from their challenges without the marriage having to fail. It’s so much harder to learn the next time around because it gets packaged in so much anger, bitterness, resentment and pain. If we could all focus on our personal learning in every challenge the path would be a lot smoother. It’s a hard mindset to get to though.

Failures are learning experiences. I am what I am now because of the lessons learned from past failures.

Just another thought after thinking about my previous post…I think that successful people don’t necessarily have to learn from “failures” because they are consistently humble and teachable. They are willing and able to make smaller course corrections along the way so that they never have to get all the way to complete failure.

An opposite case in point is a man I’ve been working with whose wife recently filed for divorce. According to her it’s been 10 years in coming. But for him he is only recently beginning to look at his side of the problems. He and his family, unfortunately, may now have to learn from failure. Had there been a regular mode of attending to challenges and mistakes along the way and making needed course corrections the “failure” could have been averted.

Maybe in the line of business a failed presentation or a deal that falls through may not be so devastating. But in my line of work with relationships a divorce generally has devastating and long-lasting consequences for all involved.

It’s true that we can all learn from our mistakes and our failures, I just think some failures need to be considered “not an option” and instead we be willing to learn from smaller less damaging incidents along the way.

i guess the painful thing about failing at something is always that i take it too personal, that i with that failure and that feeldoomed to failure even tough it is something that can happen to everybody. i mean, everyobdy fails, nobody is perfect. the taste fo the floor isn’t sweet but at times it is necessary to taste it. without it there would be no progress. there are however things like relationship problems inherited from disfuntional familiy structures that canbecome very hard to overcome, like facing the same problems again and again. that it really takes courage to change those things.
in the end for me the most important thing – which i have also learned from reading coveys book – is that i want to be remembered as a person always trying for the ideal. not necessarily succeeding but at least trying. kinda like the example in the first part of 7 habits. like witnessing your own funeral and imagining what my loved ones remember me. and thats where i would love them to remember me as a person who was trying.

one more thing comes to my mind: i think that victor frankl once talked about the right to be punished in the sense that if you want to regard a person fully responsible and not a psychological robot just responding to stimuli, you have to grant him/her the right to take responsibility for his actions. i guess the same is true for failures. we can only be regarded as non-determined personsfully aware to make decisions and guide our destiny if we accept the right to fail at something. it gives us dignitiy because then we know it is us who failed and not our parents or society or the stars who doomed us….just another thought….

I totally agree with you.

I remember failing in costs accounting in college and I really did bad in it that very semester.

However, with a strong positive mental attitude. I really worked hard and got a high grade in the same course that my professor was very impressed.

It’s not easy to transform your failure into a success as it requires more effort most of the time. You also need to let go all the frustration.

I think the most important thing for anybody who want to move forward in life is to know hw to learn frm ones failure,cos if u dnt learn frm ur failure u wil make another one