Failure is a part of success. If you are afraid of failure and do not put yourself in situations where you might fail, then you will never succeed at anything meaningful.
Of course, this means that sometimes you WILL fail. You will put yourself in situations where you are lying on your back, bruised up, unsure of how you are going to get back up. How you deal with these situations will play a huge factor in your how successful you become.
Recently, I went through some of the most challenging weeks in my life. I felt overwhelmed, frustrated and pissed off at myself because of some mistakes that I made.
This has happened many times to me, and I am actually pretty good at handling it now. So in this series of posts, I’m going to share with you a five step process that will help you deal with these situations.
If you follow these five steps, you will be able to process the situation, regroup and come out even stronger than before.
In this post I want to talk about the very first step: giving yourself permission to mope.
I know, that’s a strange thing to hear. How can it be okay to feel sad and get down on yourself? Well, whether you want them to or not, those emotions you feel are going to come out. The question is whether they will come out on your terms or not.
When you are feeling down, depressed or upset, it’s not as big of a deal as you think. No matter how successful you become, you will have moments where you feel these emotions.
Feeling bad is not a sign that you are a failure. It’s a sign that you tried and simply failed, which happens to everybody. Allow yourself to go through the healthy process of allowing these emotions to flow through you.
For some people, this means taking some alone time and just moping around. Others go through a different process. It doesn’t matter, just make sure you actually allow yourself to feel bad.
The key thing is to do it on your terms. Don’t suppress the emotions, but don’t be a slave to them, either. That means saying to yourself, “OK, I’m going to allow myself to mope for the next 60 minutes. After that, it’s time to let it go and move on.”
You see, the problem most people have with moping is that they stuff their feelings. That doesn’t work. BIG emotions don’t go away if you push them down. It’s like trying to jam 10 pounds of trash into a 5 pound bag – it all spills out sooner or later and makes a big mess of your life!
And what’s worse – the more you allow negative feelings to linger, the more they prevent you from taking any kind of action.
But if you claim control over the process, you can enjoy the cleansing benefits of moping – and without the disastrous consequences of allowing that moping to paralyze you.
The next three posts are about going through this process so that it fuels your rebound rather than holding it back.
