Daily Quote: “Champions know there are no shortcuts to the top. They climb the mountain one step at a time. They have no use for helicopters!”
Judi Adler
The first point to remember about the feedback you are getting is that the person offering it is taking a risk. By telling somebody something about them, especially if it could be considered negative, you stand the risk of being rejected yourself.
Providing feedback is a risky business. Think of the concept of shooting the messenger. There’s some truth to that saying. You could be considered a bad person, or making a fool of yourself, by telling somebody that they are on the wrong path.
So how do you react if somebody has the courage to give you feedback that you could be having a ‘failure experience’? What do you do if you have had several people advise you that something is just not working for you?
The first step would be for you to acknowledge that you did the best you could with the knowledge and skills you had at the time. In other words try not to beat yourself up. Easier said than done of course.
Then acknowledge that you survived the situation and that you can cope with any of the consequences of this particular ‘failure experience’. As a really good debriefing tool, write down everything you learnt from this particular experience.
At this stage you might not think so but all learning experiences are good. Even if you really had some severe fall-out from your actions such as losing your business and being declared insolvent there are some great learning experiences for you to benefit from.
The next step is to take this list of learning experiences and note what you can do to improve on your actions the next time you are faced with the same situation. These activities, deciding on what was learnt and how to improve on future behaviour, may be used for any ‘failure experience’.
Learning from mistakes may involve a small task such as finding the best route to work so that you don’t arrive late at the start of your work day. Or it may be about changing your approach to client relationships if you just lost an account.
It could deal with learning about relationships after your marriage broke down so that you may look forward to future relationships without fear. Perhaps you have made an application to a college and were refused a place. In all cases you will benefit if you find out what you did wrong and learn from the experiences.
These may sound such obvious steps to take and yet we tend to find this incredibly difficult. What does it say about us if we admit to having made mistakes, gone the wrong way, taken the wrong approach or failed miserably?
We feel that our very being is at stake here and if we admit to making errors we are not a worthy individual. This makes us want to blame others for our failures or make excuses for why we couldn’t have done any better.
The worst reaction we tend to have is to hide away from reality. We beat ourselves up as being incompetent and unlovable. After all if we are so bad then there is nothing we can do to improve ourselves or our situation. We are a lost cause.
What do these negative reactions do for us? They make us stay in the status quo. They stop us from being able to learn from our mistakes, move on and to find the happy life that we wish for and deserve.
