Tag: Reflection

3 ways to benefit from your failures

Achieving Goals, Success, The Fullfilment Framework

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

– Winston Churchill

1. It is an opportunity to get feedback

When we are in a working environment we often have 121 sessions with our Managers or the company has a Performance Development scheme, which can be linked to the bonuses we receive, either quarterly or annually or both. Sometimes we are involved in projects or presentations. Any of these scenarios can involve getting feedback from someone higher up in the company, usually our Manager. There is a stigma in Western culture that demonises feedback, assuming that it is always negative or in some way a personal criticism.  The problem here is that some receiving the feedback can take it as a personal attack on them as a person, because their self worth and ego are very much attached to their success, or lack of success, in the job.

I rather think that any form of feedback is an opportunity to figure out how to do better and to improve. Having a fixed mindset that our success is reliant on our abilities alone will not help us improve and get better. Taking on board the feedback we are given as actions to take to do better will mean that we will steadily rise above those who simply complain about getting feedback. Complaining gets us nowhere, it only alienates those we work with, because no one wants to hear negativity all the time. Having the courage to take feedback on the chin and move forward with positivity is a sign of strength, flexibility and humility, traits that will take us far.

2. It is an opportunity to learn something new

We only progress in life when we learn new things. If we only did the same thing over and over we would never learn to walk or run or fly. Our education does not stop when we leave school or college or university. We complete training at work, we learn new roles when we move to a new position in our company or if we move to a new company for a new job. When we get a new mobile phone some of the features will be different and we will need to learn how to use our new mobile. When we move to a new area we have to learn how to use the public transport, where the shops are, etc. All of this I would class as education. Some of use like to read books to learn new things or we watch documentaries or programs like QI. All of the above are also accepted ways to learn new things, but failure is not. Failure is often classed as a weakness in a person, but I would argue that the weakness lies in if we decide not to pick ourselves up after we fail and try again.

To illustrate this I have an example from my own life. When I was looking for a new job I was filling in applications every day for a very long time and when the application for my current job came up I decided I was not going to bother, I had had enough. I felt demoralised, but my amazing Wife kicked by butt and strongly encouraged me to apply. I completed the online assessments and got through to an interview. It was then that I decided that the job was mine and I aced the interview. If I had given up then because I had failed so many times before with other applications and other interviews I would still be stuck in the job I was trying to escape from and not working in the place I do now, which I love. I decided to look at every failed interview as opportunities to learn what went well and what I could improve on. They we stepping stones of self development.

Sometimes we need the strength of others to help us rise after failure, but even this can be a lesson in humility. Even if we fail and hit rock bottom we can use it as a foundation from which to build. Failure can teach us more about ourselves and how we handle different situations. The reason we failed can become something we realise we need to master so we can succeed. There are many lessons in failure, if we are looking for them, but we have to be looking.

3. It will help develop a growth mindset

You may have heard the term ‘growth mindset’ banded about quite a lot, but you may not really know what it means. Well I am here to demystify it for you. Generally there are two types of mindset, there is the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. A fixed mindset, as I mentioned earlier in this blog, is the viewpoint that our success is reliant solely on our abilities. The problem with this is that when adversity hits, which it will at some point, the person with the fixed mindset can crumble under the slightest pressure from adversity.

The growth mindset on the other hand is the viewpoint that our success is built upon our hard work and effort as well as our abilities. When adversity hits someone with a growth mindset they are more flexible and can work around it and develop strategies to solve problems and gain personal and team success. When we fail and we consider the failure to be because of our fixed abilities it will be hard to come back from this. If we consider the failure to be because of our actions, then we can think of what actions we could have made to have been successful and make changes. It is about taking responsibility for our failures so that we can succeed.

We can use moments of failure to develop our growth mindset skills and to learn new things. If we were never to fail then we would never grow as individuals, we would never rise to the level that we may achieve if we utilise failure to our advantage. Every successful entrepreneur has failed over and over again, but they have learned from these failures and tried again. They will all have a growth mindset. If you asked Oprah Winfrey how often she has failed in her career it would probably be more than anyone in her live audience, because she did not stop at each failure, she learned from it and kept on going. You cannot succeed long term without failure, it is a necessity. The growth mindset is so important that I have chosen it as one of the Success Principles in my Fullfilment Framework.

Remember, if you liked this post then make sure you click to Follow this blog to get notifications when I post more weekly content. May your life be happy, successful and fulfilling.

Mini Reflection: The blessings of others

Mini Reflections
Let us ponder on our blessings, on the gifts that come into our lives. Each of us is a gift to each person in our lives, and each person who comes into our lives is also a gift. Sometimes they make us smile, other times they help us to practice patience, other times they help us to practice working together for a collective goal. Let us all try to be a gift to every person whose lives we touch.
-The Fullfilment Project

The art of listening 

Happiness

I have often heard the saying that we have one mouth and two ears, so we should spend twice as long listening than we do talking. Which often gets a smile, but I believe that this deceptively simple idea actually has a deep meaning. If we followed this advice we would know more about each other and therefore would judge each other less, because knowing someone’s personal circumstances can help us better understand what they do and what they say. It also encourages us to build bridges between ourselves and others, rather than separating ourselves in an attempt at self preservation.

Listening well is a skill. There have been times when my mind has started to wander when someone was talking to me. I started thinking about the things I was going to do that day or things that were causing stress in my life at that time. I was not listening to what was being said. There have also been times when I was not listening because I was waiting for a gap to say what I wanted to say. We have all done these things, part of being human is making such self centred mistakes (occasionally). The aim is to notice that we are doing these things so we can make positive changes, but we have to be self confident enough to analyse our behaviour and adjust it for the better.

The more I have reflected on the importance of listening the more I have come to see listening as a gift; it is never about you and it is always about the person speaking. The gift of listening well to others is that they feel listened to, that they count and somebody cares enough to want to know what they have to say. Sometimes this is because they are going through a tough time and they don’t want answers, they just need someone to listen.

Sometimes listening well allows you to make appropriate suggestions that can help the person talking. The art is not only to listen well, but also to know when is the right time to comment or give advice and when you should just listen. It is an art because it is hard to get right. It takes practice, for some more than  others and that is OK.

The benefit of listening also means that you learn new things.  You can learn from every person you meet if you listen to them. When you listen you receive. When you talk this can’t happen. Let us all try to listen more and talk less.

Have you ever successfully helped someone by listening to them?

A Reflection on Resilience

Happiness, Success

Resilience is an essential character trait when it comes to happiness and success. It is the ability to treat knock-backs and disappointments as feedback, as opportunities to learn, which will result in both happiness and success. However, this can be a difficult mindset to engage in, because it feels more natural to react to knock-backs and disappointments with negativity, to treat them as negative feedback. This is due to the mental habits we have developed, the examples we have witnessed and the general assimilation of the narratives from the culture we have grown up in.

What we need to do is detach the negative from the feedback and disappointments, to try to look at it with a neutral mindset and try to tease out what can be constructive, so that we can move forward more positively. This, as with many things, requires practice. To a large degree we are working against all of the mental habits we have thus far embedded into the pathways of our brains. The good news is that if we repeatedly look for the feedback that we can use to make ourselves better, and as a result our careers and our relationships better, we will build resilience to cope with the disasters that life can sometimes drop on us. When we train our minds in this way we become ready for the tough times in life, but it has to be a daily practice otherwise when the disaster hits we will crumble.