Success and failure can be traced back to the individuals personality. “Attitude is everything”, is timeless advice. The positive attitude combined with a very clearly defined image of the goal is a winning combination.

One characteristic of people who succeed is that they don’t blame outside circumstances, conditions or others for their failures. They accept the responsibility for their circumstance without beating themselves up for it. They recognize it as fact that they failed, this time, and move on to even greater success in the next endeavor. When you take a failure personally, you doom yourself to repeat history.  When the failure is replayed over and over in the creative imagination it becomes self defeating.  While successful people do fail, they never quit in the pursuit of success. To them, failure is a temporary, transient event, not to be taken personally but to be learned from and used toward future success.

In fact, some degree of failure helps to guide us toward the goal and learn what not to do.

Success and failure just don’t happen out of no where, there is no such thing as luck. Sure, being at the right place at the right time is helpful but even that isn’t entirely necessary as there are opportunities in every environment.

The current real estate market is an excellent example where many people in that industry are failing yet not everyone is. The foreclosure market is providing a very good income for those who have taken advantage of that opportunity while the majority who haven’t or have choosen not to are struggling. One agent I know struggled when the market was booming and, now that the “air is being let out of the bag”, tells me that “money is falling from the sky!” While I inherently see the flaw in his approach, you’ve got to respect someone who finds a way to succeed while the majority, at least, are struggling. Opportunity is everywhere and if one pays attention to the direction of the wind, adjustments can be made to a least minimize losses. That’s the power of attitude, seeing the “glass half full” as it were.

 Being aware of the attributes of the failure personality, as Dr. Maltz describes it, will help you to become aware of these feelings and help you to make adjustments to your thinking and feelings when they arise about any situation.

 They are:

F - Frustration

A - Aggressiveness

I - Insecurity

L - Loneliness

U - Uncertainty

R - Resentment

E - Emptiness

All of these feeling distract one from being focused in the moment and present to what is occurring now.  These feelings can be paralyzing and inhibit the actions necessary for successful completion of any goal.

The way to rid yourself of these feelings is not to try and block them out but to replace them with other feelings, success personality attributes for example.  Thoughts are going to come up, that’s how we’re wired. While I’m a firm believer that we can create more space around our thoughts or in between our thoughts, it does not seem possible to completely block out all thoughts for a prolonged period.  Rather, if we replace these thoughts with thoughts of success rather than thoughts of failure we change our results.

Be on the lookout for these feelings when they come up.  They can be very destructive toward achieving your goals, happiness and peace.  All events are transient and what looks monumental in the moment is often part a larger plan that we can’t possibly be aware of or, at a minimum, will mean very little to us in a short time going forward.

Tags: , failure, personal growth, success coaching

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