The brilliant and masterful Dr. Cathy Collautt was on MarieTV again sharing her 4 steps to overcome a failure or setback and this short episode is too powerful not to share!
My favorite parts:
If you’re going to live a life worth living, make it a must to learn to deal with setbacks because they are going to happen. That’s Step #1. I love this framework of failure and setbacks…that it’s a normal and expected part of life and if you are on the way to success, failure is just earlier on the path to get there. You will encounter it. Here are a few gems from Cathy:
“Success and failure are on the same path. (Step #2) Think about it. Always before you can do something there’s a period of time in which you cannot or have not yet proven that you can do this thing. Always you can’t do it first. In fact, up until that third or 30th or 300th time when you succeed, every prior attempt is to some extent a setback or a failure. This means that successful people actually fail just as often, if not more than their unsuccessful counterparts. You’ve probably heard some version of the saying that the most important difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones never interpret failure as the last word on the subject.”
Leave off drawing conclusions about your character, your worth, and/or your entire existence because you’ve seen failures.
You will see failures. You’re supposed to see failures, otherwise you’re not giving enough of yourself to your life — you’re not really trying.
“Celebrate the effort, not the result. (Step #3) To begin to regain confidence, you want to applaud yourself for trying. Remember you had two options: try or not try. Genuinely applaud yourself for putting yourself out there and for trying. Your applause should be equal to your earnestness, how much of yourself you really gave, and the raw effort you made, and not in proportion to your perceived success or lack thereof. So your action step here is to applaud yourself to the extent that you got in the ring instead of sitting on the sideline.”
Confine your conclusions. (Step #4) You don’t want to let this specific failure become global about you, your life, your abilities. You wanna confine your conclusions and your shame to this iteration, to this try, to this specific experiment, to this particular manifestation of your effort, to this try or this iteration. Watch the tendency to draw increasingly global conclusions as the result of a specific failure. And the more you generalize and abstract your conclusion from this specific iteration or expression of your effort, the more you inflate its failure to cover ever increasing aspects of yourself and your life and the harder it will be for you to do two things: learn from it and try again. So your action step here is to confine your conclusions and your shame to the iteration. Don’t by rote spin off into an abyss of lifelong character judgments, nor even necessarily what a lost cause you are at this. Relegating your conclusions to the effort rather than to your essential nature is definitely a healthier if not more correct way to engage with the game of life.”