The one thing most people need to focus on, and they don’t, is failure. Learning from failure, to be exact. Putting time and effort into looking at failures provides insight into why it happened. What went wrong. What could have been done differently, to avoid it. 

Failure is not final. And, it is inevitable. At some point in our lives we would all experience it. Embrace it and see the silver lining in it. The lessons that can be gleaned from it can provide the building blocks to a brighter future. Don’t beat yourself up for what happened. Learn from it. Make sure it does not happen again. 

I have trained people across 15 countries and across sector and functional divides. A phenomena I come across often is the desperate need to move on and away from mistakes, taking away from the lessons contained therein. A live example is sales people. They go from door to door, meeting after meeting, onto the next one and so on. If they would just stop for 15 seconds after every meeting and ask themselves: What went wrong, what made me uncomfortable, what questions was I unable to answer effectively, what parts of the product or service was I not able to convey clearly, which objections was I unable to answer and so on. If they do this, then once they are back at office, they can check on how to manage these situations optimally, look into the data available, talk to their managers or colleagues and end up plugging all the holes. They would never have to experience that failure again. But, alas, this virtually never happens. It’s a vicious cycle and one that needs to be addressed.

This example applies to anyone and everyone. Do we take stock at the end of the day to think about how the day unfolded? What were some things I could have handled better. Was there something that irked me? Was most of the day’s work fighting fires or was it more directed towards achieving my goals? Was it a good day? What is that one thing that I could have done to make it a great day? Etc. etc. These may not be failures in the larger picture, but each step that can help us move towards our life goals is a step that needs to be a success. Every step that fails is a step that has pushed you back. Unless one learns from it.  

All the big books on the smaller steps we take (7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Atomic Habits, The power of Habits etc.) all point towards smaller steps having the power to change our future. Ensuring all these smaller pieces come together to attain our objectives is key. Failure in these smaller actions would lead to the same results for our larger goals. Re-visiting our failures in these smaller areas would help us “get there” more efficiently.    

Introspection is a powerful tool. One that is often underutilized. Keeping long term goals is a good thing, but a more granular look into the day-to-day activities that would help get you there is also as critical. So, invest in failures that we experience, so that we learn from our mistakes and correct the course of history.

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uzair.hassan@3hsolutions.biz