If you knew that tomorrow you are going to flop
–experience failure in some dimension of your life–
would you be scared?
Of course you would!
Defeat is painful.
Sometimes humiliating.
Anyone who claims to have no fear of failure
is either lying or psychotic.
We are all scared of defeat,
to one degree or another.
Why?
We care about what we are trying to do.
We want very badly to succeed and achieve our goals.
Healthy fear of failure actually helps us do that.
It motivates us to work hard
and do our best to make sure we succeed.
Unhealthy fear of failure, however, paralyzes us.
It stops us from even trying to succeed.
For a discussion of the difference
between healthy and unhealthy fear,
and how to deal with each kind,
please see my previous post
How do I get free of fear?
But let’s face it:
no matter how we feel about failure
we are all going to experience it.
Sometimes in a major way.
Maybe the best thing we can do
is to give serious thought beforehand
to what we will do when a defeat happens.
Maybe we need to ask ourselves:
How will I handle it?
It isn’t actually pessimism to think ahead
and prepare.
It is realism.
One day
you are going to get the crap knocked out of you.
At some point, you are going to go down in flames.
The important question is:
What are you going to DO when that happens?
Another time
we will talk about actions you can take
to help prevent defeat.
Margaret Thatcher had a concise strategy:
“Defeat? I do not recognise the meaning of the word.”
One day we will look at the pros and cons
of that strategy and others.
But today
I am going to arm you to deal with defeat
when it happens.
How can we deal with defeat?