There are days when you navigate life with tremendous skills and days when you have Ultimate Fail days. Sometimes I have days that I unintentionally let people down and the one who feels the worst about it is usually me. Today was one of those Ultimate Fail days. I forgot to call someone, I missed an appointment, and I forgot to email someone something – all within the course of few short hours. I had a choice as to how I was going to navigate those failures. My past was littered with pity parties and self-hate sessions that would last a whole day; however, I am trying to look at failures differently these days because I am learning that there are benefits to failing. Most successes are usually built upon previous failures and failure usually comes before success. Failures show me where I need improvement and failures are packed full of lessons on how to do life differently, but there is a catch; how do I do different if I do not know how to do something different? This is the question that can be addressed with others through therapy, your job, church, school, friends and sometimes your family. It seems we all know what we need to do, but we don’t necessary know how to achieve it because we need someone to teach us how to do that new way of living. Many times how we learned to navigate life is through the patterns our parents and grandparents taught us to deal with life. Alas, many of us enter adulthood lacking the essential skills necessary to be successful in multiple areas: having friends, pursuing education, pursuing purpose, making financial decisions, intimately relating to those close to us in our lives, etc, etc, etc.. Where are you lacking skills? Who do you see who is successful in those areas you are lacking? These are the people we need to learn from because we are never going to be able to teach ourselves something that was never modeled to us unless, of course, the person who is teaching us happens to be named God.
Ultimate Fail Days