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August 23 - September 4, 2019
Now, I place high value on praising people, especially children. In fact, I believe that people live up to your level of expectations.
Here's the approach I use to encourage and lead others:
Value people. Praise effort. Reward performance.
As the saying goes, "God uses people who fail—'cause there aren't any other kind around."
Another way achievers keep themselves from personalizing failure is by focusing on their strengths.
If a weakness is a matter of character, it needs much attention. Focus on it until you shore it up. Otherwise, the best bet for failing forward is developing and maximizing your strengths.
If you've been thinking of yourself as a failure, you can break yourself out of that negative thinking pattern. Look at an area of your life where you have repeatedly failed, and do the following: • Examine your expectations for that area. Write them down. Are they realistic? Do you expect to do everything perfectly? Do you expect to succeed on the first try? How many mistakes should you expect to make before you succeed? Adjust your expectations. • Find new ways to do your work. Brainstorm at least twenty new approaches, and then try at least half of them. • Focus on your strengths. How can
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People who want to get out of the fear cycle often spend time feeling guilty for their inability to change.
To conquer fear, you have to feel the fear and take action anyway.
The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it. Exercise, lose weight, test your blood sugar, or whatever. Do it without motivation and then guess what. After you start doing the thing, that's when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.
"You're more likely to act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action."
To overcome fear and break the cycle, you have to be willing to recognize that you will spend much of your life making mistakes.
If you can take action and keep making mistakes, you gain experience.
The only way to break the cycle is to face your fear and take action, even though it may seem small or insignificant.
Examine your list and accept the fact that you are afraid. Determine what first step you can take to get started on achieving that objective. It doesn't matter whether it's small or large. Just do it. If you fail at it, do it again. Keep trying until you accomplish that first step. Then figure out what the next step is.
Mistakes are . . . Messages that give us feedback about life. Interruptions that should cause us to reflect and think. Signposts that direct us to the right path. Tests that push us toward greater maturity. Awakenings that keep us in the game mentally. Keys that we can use to unlock the next door of opportunity. Explorations that let us journey where we've never been before. Statements about our development and progress.
A similar saying is the law of human behavior: "Sooner or later we get just what we expect."
"The people who bounce back are optimists."2
But the truth is that possessing healthy contentment is essential to being able to withstand failure.
Why worry about things you can't control when you can keep yourself busy controlling the things that depend on you?
In contrast, someone who is unable to get over previous hurts and failures is held hostage by the past. The baggage he carries around makes it very difficult for him to move forward. In fact, in more than thirty years of working with people, I have yet to meet a successful person who continually dwelled on his past difficulties.
No matter what you've experienced, remember this: There are people who've had it better than you and done worse. And there are people who've had it worse than you and done better.
But you must also take responsibility for who you are as a person. That means owning up to what you cannot do (based on skill), should not do (based on talent), and ought not do (based on character).
No one ever achieved his dreams working outside his areas of gifting. To excel, do what you do well.
Not realizing what you want is a problem of knowledge. Not pursuing what you want is a problem of motivation. Not achieving what you want is a problem of persistence.
Many people who struggle with chronic failure do so because they think of no one but themselves.
To achieve your dreams, you must embrace adversity and make failure a regular part of your life. If you're not failing, you're probably not really moving forward.
