You Can Deal with Failure

Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.

--John Hersey

Let me ask you to take a moment and do some honest reflection. Find a quiet space where you can think without distraction and answer these questions:

When you have failed, what did you do as a result?

Did you feel bad about yourself?

Did you withdraw from the pursuit of whatever it was that you failed at?

Are you now doing the thing you failed at then?

Are you doing it successfully?

Is there anything you would like to do now that you are not doing because you might fail?

How you answer those questions, or more accurately, how you have lived out the answers to those questions, has the power to determine where you end up in life. Your answers will determine your success in the areas that you care about most. In this chapter we will explore the positive ways you can deal with inevitable failures on your path to your goals.

Same Story, Different Endings

One day at a seminar, I talked with a woman who was despairing over her dating life. She had withdrawn from the dating scene after a few rejections, and she now had virtually no hope of ever finding a relationship.

At the start of the year she had been determined to improve her somewhat nonexistent dating life. She had set some great goals to get things moving. She even surrounded herself with a support group and joined a dating service to meet new people. She got a couple of “matches” and went out with the guys. She had a decent time and was looking forward to a second date with both of them. But the calls never came. The men did not want to go out on second dates with her. Both of them had “moved on.”

The woman was devastated. She withdrew from her supportive friends and stopped checking her e-mail for activity on the dating site. She turned into something of an MIA in the dating world. But worse than that, she felt awful.

When I asked her what was going on inside, she said things like, “I am such a loser. No one will ever want me. I don't know why I even tried. This is never going to work, I will always be alone.”

I did not have much time to talk with her, but none of my encouragement or suggestions seemed to help. Her mind was made up. From her point of view it was hopeless and would never be any different.

Fast forward to a week later. I was talking to another woman who also committed herself to reviving a stagnant dating life. She, too, had set some goals and joined a dating service.

At first nothing happened. She got no responses. But instead of seeing herself as a loser, she asked herself “I wonder what is wrong with the way I am doing this?” She called a friend who had been successful with online dating and got her to help rewrite her profile.

Soon the matches began to happen. She liked two of the men she dated and wrote back to them saying she had had a great time and would love to see them again. But nothing happened. Apparently neither of the men desired to see her again.

“Bummer,” she said. But she continued her pursuit of dating.

Then another guy appeared on the scene, and they went out one evening. She liked him, and he called again. And again and again and again. She was having a good time and beginning to like this man quite a lot. So far, so good. Until . . . she got an e-mail saying, in effect, “It has been great hanging out with you, but I don't see a future for us. Hope this finds you well, and good luck.”

Here she thought things were going well and instead she was faced with the classic let's-be-friends situation. Stunned and bewildered, the poor woman went into a little mini-shock. She was quite sad for a while and cried a bit with her friends. But then she regrouped and came to me for help.

She explained her feelings. “Well, that experience was tough. I really liked that guy. I thought things were really beginning to click with us, and I still don't know what went wrong.” As she and I unpacked it together, we uncovered one of the problems. Her desperateness had caused her to become something of a people pleaser with him. In trying so hard to get him to like her, she had become less herself and, as a result, less interesting. Predictably, he lost interest and moved on.

However, she learned from that insight, and the next time she did it differently. She relaxed and became more herself As a result, she found greater freedom in her dating. She was no longer bound by her concern about whether the man was interested, but instead allowed herself to be authentically who she was in the dating process. That was a big growth step for her.

Then it happened. She called me one day and said, “I think I have found him.” And you know what? She was right. They married a year later.

Coincidentally, that same week I ran into the first woman again. “How is your dating life going? I asked, thinking that by now she might have turned it around.

I could tell instantly that this was not the case. Her eyes began to water, and her chin began to quiver. “Not too good,” she said. “Not too good.”

I empathized with her and asked if she wanted to talk about it. She did, and I heard a very sad story. She had not been on any dates since that rejection of more than a year ago. She still felt that she was a loser, and no one would ever want her.

I reflected back to the last time we had talked and what had occurred. Then it hit me. She and the second woman had the exact same story--up to a point. Both had experienced a season of nothing good happening. Both had committed to changing that. Both had gotten active and stepped out into the game. Both had received some initial responses, and both went on a couple of dates. But that is where the similarities ended. From there one went into despair and took a thousand steps backward, and the other

moved on toward reaching her goal. Same story, very different outcomes. What was the difference?

Was one woman more interesting? More attractive? More appealing in some way? Is that why one reached her goal while the other one didn't? Not at all. The outcomes were determined by the way these women answered the questions we listed at the beginning of this chapter. Look at how the two answered these questions and you will see that they responded to failure in very different ways.

Q: When you failed, what did you do as a result?

A: One withdrew and quit, and the other learned from her failure and kept going.

Q: Did you feel bad about yourself?

A: One saw herself as a loser, and the other didn't.

Q: Did you withdraw from the pursuit of whatever it was that you failed at?

A: One did, and the other didn't.

Q: Are you now doing the thing you failed at then?

A: One isn't, and the other is happy in a relationship.

Q: Are you doing it successfully?

A: One isn't, and the other is.

Q: Is there anything you would like to do now that you are not doing because you might fail?

A: One would like to be dating or in a relationship. The other doesn't have to worry about that anymore and has moved on to other goals.

These two women did the exact same things, up to a point: the point of failure. And from there, one went on to success and the other didn't. How to respond to failure is one of the most important lessons you can learn in life. And that is the lesson of this chapter.

Some Things in Life Are Certain, Or the Nature of Everything

We have all heard it said that two things in life are certain: death and taxes. While that is true, there is also another certainty: failure. It is absolutely a given. It is the nature of everything. In fact, without
failure we never succeed.

Think of the things that you do well. You probably walk okay, for example. And when you eat, you probably get most of your food in mouth. But that was not always so, was it? If we had the video of your life, we would see you as a toddler going through walking and eating processes that look very little like your current level of performance. A lot of your steps would have ended with you on your face. A lot of your pasta would also have ended up on your cheeks and chin. If today you still walk and eat like you did then, second dates are likely to be rarities for you. But walking and eating do not present problems in your dating life today. The reason? You have gotten failure in those areas out of your system. You have done something called “learning.”

The process went like this: you tried, and you didn't get it right. You walked three or four steps, then sat down hard on your padded area. You had a bad outcome. Your parents told you, “No problem. Try again. You tried again and got a little closer to the goal before you hit the carpet. Your parents helped you up and you walked ten feet this time--all the way to the couch. Your parents cheered. You made similar progress on the eating front. After many noodles filling to the table, the floor, and down your shirt, you finally got most of the pasta inside your mouth and managed to keep it there. Your parents clapped and said, “Way to go!” Before long those awkward tasks became second nature. You walked and ate without conscious effort and no one made a big deal of it. In fact, you got to the point where you were performing those tasks so well that your parents were even trying to curb them: “Don't eat that candy before dinner, and don't leave the yard.” Success brings its own set of problems.

The point is that whatever is now second nature to you was at one time a very, very, daunting task, and you failed the first times that you tried it.

Failing at those tasks did not mean anything to you other than “try again”. Failure brought no personal Interpretation as to your lovability or capability or feelings about yourself or the world at large. Failure meant simply that the task was yet to be learned. Everything you now do as second nature has gone through that process. You did not do it well the first time, and yet you did it again and again until you figured it out. That is the nature of life. We try, we don't get it right, and we try again until we do. Then when the task is learned, we forget about the process of it and just do it, enjoying the result of the ability we have finally mastered.

There are people who date for fun, for example. They don't think once about rejection or the date not working out well. They just do it and enjoy it. The reason is that they have learned how, and now it is second nature. The jitters of adolescence, the shyness, and the misgivings are all in the past. They have become seasoned veterans.

In fact, the second woman, the one who learned to date well and ended up married, told me, “The change came when I began to be unaffected by rejection. I had always let rejection do me in. But the more I got with the program, the less it bothered me because I knew I was on a path, and one rejection was merely a step to the next step. Rejection actually became kind of funny sometimes.

The same thing goes for people who are successful at public speaking, making sales calls, playing championship golf matches, starting new businesses, interviewing for a new job, or whatever. They have gone through the failing part and now know how to do their job. But they did not skip the failure part. Their stumbles and falls are certainly on the video. But more often than not, the ones who are not doing well are stuck because they have not moved successfully through the failure cycle. They got hung up there.

The different between the winners and those who are not winning is not that the winners do not fail.

They both fail, but the winners see it as normal, move through it well, and get past it. The others get stuck, not because they are incapable doing whatever it is they are attempting, but because they are incapable of handling failure.

Lesson number one about failure is this: whatever you wish to do, you will fail at it in the beginning Accept that reality. That is the nature of the world. Everything works that way. Of course you can always point to exceptions, like the person who hits a home run his first time at bat, or some other lottery winner. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Ninety-nine out of a hundred winners will tell you that failure was the way to success.

Let's look at nine steps you can take toward full ownership of your life, beginning with failure.

Step One: Normalize and Deal with Failure

To take ownership of your life and get to where you want to be, you must take ownership of your failure. To own it means to put your arms around it, take it home and claim it as yours, nurse it, feed it, and take care of it. It's like buying a car or a house. You are no longer leasing; it is all yours, and no one else is responsible for it. The good part of that is this: since you now own your life, you can add value to it, make improvements, control it, and ultimately reap the benefits of it. If you are not an owner, all you can do is complain to the landlord, which, as we have seen, is what a lot of people do with their lives. They act as if someone else owns their life and they are renters. So when things don't go right, they just complain. The problem is that they have to live in their life, so it makes good sense to own failure so they can fix it up.

The first step, then, is to normalize failure. Accept the reality that it is a normal part of life. Do that and you won't get knocked off your horse when something doesn't work out. It won't surprise you. You will accept it, take God's hand, and go solve that problem. If you have trouble getting in touch with the reality of inevitable trouble, remember the words of Jesus: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33 NIV). Expect trouble and failure, but also expect that taking courage and joining him to work it out will get you over the hump and to your goal.

Why doesn't everyone who encounters failure pick himself up and try again? Why does one woman get rejected on a couple of dates then go on to find the love of her life, while another who gets rejected, quits? Why does one person make a sales call, get rejected, and later that month land the big account, while another gives up? The answer: one has normalized failure and learned how to deal with it, while the other has not. Let's look at why and how.

Step Two: Find Out What Failing Means to You

Now that you have accepted the fact that failure is normal in the process of becoming successful, you are ready for the next step. But before you take that step, let's prepare the way by exploring a few questions to check your present thinking on what happens when you fail.

What do you feel when you fail? (In other words, when you are rejected for a date or do not close the deal or your venture goes belly up.)

Do you feel bad and get deflated? (Not mere disappointment, but a judgment about yourself that plunges you into immobilizing emotional states.)

Does all hope go out of you? (A feeling that things will never be any different.)

Do you tell yourself that you are a loser? (Internal dialogue leads you to pin a global, critical label on yourself.)

Do you think that success is for others and not you? (You feel you are missing something that others have.)

Do you think that there is just no answer for your dilemma? (It's beyond anything you can learn or grow into, no matter how hard you try.)

Do you feel guilty? (A gnawing feeling that you should have been able to do this.)

Do you feel like it is all your fault? (An accusing, shaming, condemning feeling.)

Do you go into the “all bad” position? (Losing sight of your abilities, strengths, talents, aptitudes.)

Do you begin to hate God and think that he is not for you? (The feeling that God has let you down, or even has it in for you.)

Many people respond to failure in these ways because they interpret the failure to have a specific, harmful meaning. But as we have shown above, this is the wrong way to look at failure. The accurate meaning of failure is that it is a learning experience--a time to learn about ourselves, to learn the skills needed to master an endeavor we want to accomplish, or to learn more about the nature of the endeavor itself. But instead of seeing it as time to learn, many interpret failure in other ways that set them up to stop trying, as the list above shows. Usually, those negative interpretations come from our previous experiences. Failure has taken on bad meanings acquired from painful experiences in our families growing up or in other significant relationships.

The meanings that failure has for us come from our past experiences and relationships. They affect us in several significant categories: our view of others, our view of the world and how it works, and our view of God. When we go into new situations, we experience them through those grids, belief systems, emotional reactions and patterns of behavior that we have built through past experiences of failure or difficulty.

For example, if my experiences have made me feel like a loser, then I take that belief into new situations. If I fail in a new endeavor, I experience that new failure as confirmation of my negative belief about myself. “See, I knew it. I am a loser. I will never be able to make anything work. I'm just not capable.” Or, we might have a bad experience with a person, and it means to us that “people will always hurt me or let me down.” Or, “God is against me,” or “The world itself is just too hard to figure out. There is no real way to make things turn out well.”

These meanings become part of our makeup, and they live in our hearts, minds, and souls. They operate immediately and subconsciously, without our awareness that we are even following them. They cause us to live out patterns of behavior and choices that correspond to those particular meanings. We react defensively, protectively, aggressively, or withdraw from the game and quit trying. This happens because our life experiences have infused these meanings for failure into our character, and when we fail, they automatically kick in and take over. We lose our ability to choose and respond.

Look at your history of trying things in the areas where you feel stuck. Look at the areas that most depress you and in which you have stopped trying. Those are the places where it is most likely that you are operating by old messages and experiences. Figure out what those are. Listen to your thoughts and the voices in your head. Observe your feelings about those areas. You will learn the reason why you have given up or feel so negative about trying again. When you recognize where these old messages come from, you can reject them and break free of them. You can get support and validation from people on your team and rework the way you think and feel. But if you treat these old false messages as reality, then they will become reality. “I can't ever win” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

Step Three: Go Ahead and Say It: “I Failed”

The first step to moving past failure is to call it what it is. But all too often those negative meanings we apply to failure shame us so much that we become afraid even to look at failure as reality. We become afraid even to say it:

“I failed.”

“It didn't work.”

“I blew it.”

“Oh my gosh…did I ever not know what I was doing!”

“I screwed it up.

“I didn't have a clue to what I was doing. Have I ever got a lot to learn!”

What is so hard about that? It is actually empowering and freeing not to have to hide from failure, but to embrace it and admit it. Watch the people who do. Check out the winners who laugh about their failures. They are relaxed and comfortable because they have gotten out of the image protection business. And, they are so endearing. The people who own and talk about their mistakes as their mistakes are much more connectable and easy to identify with. They are not hung up in the useless business of trying to impress themselves or others. Instead, they are into results. People like this are so refreshing, and the good news is that you can be one of them.

Get around people who are honest about their shortcomings. They are infectious. You will like them, and they will help you become more comfortable about facing yours. Enter the land of freedom…where you can admit imperfection. It is a wonderful place to be, and others will respect and like you for being there.

Recently, our Web hosting company had a hardware meltdown. It was awful. For a good while we had no Web service or e-mail. When it first happened, we were bummed but not dismayed, because we got the word that we would only be down for a day. But the next day the news was worse. Their servers and backup servers had all crashed, and now the word came that repair was going to take longer. Since we work with publishers and organizations all over the country, to not have e-mail essentially means that we are shut down and cannot function. At that point things went from bad to really bad, as groups and media outlets were trying to get responses from US about scheduled speaking engagements and other time sensitive issues. But there was not much we could do.

I called the head of the IT company that had set us up with this hosting company and asked, “Why are we with a company that could allow this to happen? Can't we find someone else?” He assured me that for the services we needed, this host company was the best in the business and that they had his total trust. He described the events causing the crash as the “perfect storm” and said that there was nothing reasonable that they could have done to prevent it. His message was to hang in there. I trusted him, but I was more than a little bugged with the hosting company.

Then it got worse. The hosting company had been telling us that all the data would be recovered when they were up and running. But the unthinkable happened: they called me and said that they had recovered everyone's data…except mine. Mine was gone. Lost forever. My schedule, my e-mail, my archived mail from every organization I work with, and on and on. Everything that lived on the server had vanished never to be seen again. I could not believe my ears.

Fortunately, I discovered that the full computer backup I make myself do weekly had kept it all. I ended up losing only a day and a half of mail between my last backup and the failure. We got up and running again, apologized to everyone who had been waiting on us, and continued on. But at that moment I had less than zero confidence in our hosting company. They had not only gone down, they had gone down for a week! And then on top of that, they had erased my life. I still wanted my IT company to find a new host company.

But then everything changed.

I got an e-mail from the president of the host company, a message he sent to all of their accounts. I won't take up space printing the letter, but here are the essential elements of it:

* We really blew it. We were not prepared for what happened. It was our mistake.

* We are deeply sorry for the disruption that it caused you.

* Thank you to all who called and expressed your frustration to us, telling us of the things we could have done better to serve you.

* We took copious notes throughout the entire process in order to learn from what happened.

* Here is what we learned that we should have done differently.

* Here is what we have done to fix the vulnerability and correct those mistakes.

* Here are the things that we learned that we did right.

* Here are the changes that we are making.

* Here are some suggestions for you to protect yourself as well.

* We understand if you want to switch companies, and if you do, we will be glad to help you and make the transition as painless as possible.

Immediately my whole attitude changed. I was dealing with a winner here, not a loser. I felt that as long as this guy was leading the company, I was in good hands. Why, because he never failed? No, it was because when he failed, he owned it, admitted it, and put his arms around it to learn from it. He used his failure as a step toward becoming a great company. That is what gave me confidence, not the fact that he had not made mistakes. Give me a person who makes a mistake and knows what to do with it anytime over someone who does not own his failures.

Can't you see another company excusing, blaming, and not owning its failure in a crisis like this? “It's not our fault! It's the power surges, the crummy hardware providers, the complicated nature of Windows. Call your manufacturer or your software provider, this is not our problem. Excuses like these are the first line of defense on most technical help lines, “Someone else is responsible, not us. It's not our fault.”

But here was a winner. I immediately wrote the president of that company a letter and thanked him for his ownership and leadership. I told him that was why our company would be sticking with him.

I urge you to join the winners who own their failures and learn from them. All the energy you consumed protecting yourself from failure or defending yourself when you filed or beating yourself up because you failed will be channeled into solving problems and learning from them.

Step Four: Learn from It

In the story of the Web hosting company, we can see what I like to call the “autopsy” of a failure experience. When something does not go right, don't beat yourself up or get on your case about it. Use t to your advantage! You spent a lot of good energy and probably money; time, resources, relationship equity; and other assets on this lesson. So wring everything out of it that you can. Figure out such things as:

* What you did wrong

* What you did right

* What you missed along the way

* What choices you made that you don't want to make again

* Why you made them and what weaknesses contributed to those mistakes

* What support would have helped you

* What new skills you need to develop to make it different the next time

* What teachers or mentors or counselors or consultants you might want with you

* What about this situation reveals a pattern that you have seen before

* What blind spots you have about yourself or others that led to this

In my speaking and counseling on marriage, dating, and relationships, I see one theme over and over Some people who experience a failed relationship repeat the same failure with every new relationship they find. They do not learn. They just keep on going without addressing the things that contributed to the last failure. Others, however, figure out their contribution to the problem, learn from it through divorce recovery or counseling, do the necessary work, and then move on to make better choices. They learn from each mistake so they do not have to make that one again.

We have seen that mistakes are normal. They are the progression of learning. Think back to the second grade and the mistakes you made as you learned to read or write or do math. What if you had just ignored those mistakes? What if your teacher had let you continue on down the path without correcting them? You would have made the same mistakes again, and you would have repeated that grade over and over. Then in real life you would face all sorts of problems, ranging from an inability to get a job to an inability to make your finances work. In other words, until we learn to get it right, we will repeat the mistake. If you learn from your mistake, however, you can correct it and move on to the next grade, the next level of relationship, or the next level of work.

Step Five: Get Forgiveness

There is an immutable law in the universe that comes right out of the Bible: whatever is under judgment does not improve. It gets worse. In other words, as long as you feel guilty and condemned for your failure, it will not get better. It will stay the same, at best, or it will get worse. It is under the law of condemnation. You will not get better by feeling guilty, mad at yourself ashamed, afraid, or any of those negative emotions. You will get better only by finding grace, or “unmerited favor” from God and other people. As you are accepted “in your failure,” the sting and the power of condemnation will go away, and you will be free to look at the problem instead of your guilt and fear.

To illustrate, let's say a child makes a mistake on her math homework. When her dad sees the mistake, he begins to berate her, put her down, and make her feel guilty. What do you think she is focused on at that moment? Learning math? I don't think so. Her entire being is focused on how bad she is, what a loser she is, how afraid of her father she is, or how mad at him she is, what a jerk he is, how she hates school, how she wants to run away, and on and on. Whatever is going through her head, it is not about getting better at school. The wrath and condemnation have done one thing only: they have diverted the focus away from the real issue, which is the girl's math performance.

To improve in areas of failure, you must receive forgiveness and grace. You have to get with people and with God and understand the most liberating message of the entire world: if you want forgiveness. God gives it. He forgives you for anything you do. And good people will do the same. But to realize that forgiveness, you have to talk to these people. You have to open up to them, confess to them, and allow them to know you and love you in your failure.

Put down the fig leaf; take off the mask. Open up to some safe people about your failure, and show them the reality of who you are. When they accept you, you will learn to accept yourself as well. Then the sting of failure will go away and the freedom to get better will kick in. You will look like Tiger Woods on the practice tee, hitting a shot and watching it to see how it went. You won't find him standing there beating himself up and feeling guilty about a slice that sailed into the rough. He just corrects his swing to make the next shot better.

IF you do not find forgiveness from outside of yourself then you will not have it on the inside. It takes forgiveness from others to affirm our perception of our own value when we fail. Ask God, and he will grant it. But also show your failures to others who accept you and you will internalize their love.

If you have failed others, go to them and own your mistake and seek their forgiveness. If there is something more to be done, make amends. Make it right. In doing that, you will help those you have failed in the same way you failed them. You will also be restored to them, overcome your own guilt, and become an altogether different person than the one who failed them. In seeking forgiveness and making amends, you become a healing agent to the one you hurt, and that is a huge improvement, not only for you, but also for the relationship and for the person you failed. God sees forgiveness and making amends as so important that he tells us to get right with others before we try to approach him: “First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:24 NIV).

Step Six: Look at Your Responses

We have seen how important it is to look at the meaning that you attribute to failure, because negative feelings and conclusions can cause you to remain stuck. The next step is to figure out what you do at that point, in order to do that, you must evaluate those feelings and conclusions. How did they affect your responses to failure, and what can you do differently?

When you fail, do you:

* Withdraw?

* Get angry at yourself?

* Get angry at someone else?

* Give up?

* Not try again?

* Change courses impulsively?

* Eat, drink, or medicate yourself in some unhealthy way?

* Look for meaningless distractions that get you no closer to what you want?

* Make excuses?

* Blame?

* Avoid looking at it and remain in denial?

* Run to some area of strength to make yourself feel better instead of looking at your weakness?

The negative meanings you place on failure and your emotional reactions to it always generate accompanying behavioral patterns. You must uncover your own negative patterns and take steps to change them. In do that, you will probably need some support from outside yourself--a group, an accountability partner, a counselor, or some outside structure. Old patterns usually do not change as a result of willpower or just by making different commitments. Such changes require outside support.

An addict's life changes when he realizes that his pattern of response to failure is to return to the drug. To change this failure pattern he must attend a meeting to find the support he needs to resist returning to the drug. He has to interrupt his predictable pattern of response to failure. Going to the meeting instead of using the drug changes the pattern. To change your own patterns, you must have that same kind of structure waiting in the wings of your life---a structure you can turn to for support when you fail to overcome those patterns in the aforementioned list.

The most important tip we can give you in pursuing any goal may be to ask these questions: What will I do when the failure pattern hits me the next time? Who will I call, or where will I go? What will I do differently?

When you find the answers to these questions, your chances of success will shoot way up.

Step Seven: Go for It Again

In one of my relationship seminars, a young man told me that the fear of rejection kept him from asking women out. “I can't handle rejection,” he said. “How can I avoid it?”

My answer surprised him. I told him that he needed to get his rejection numbers up, not down. “I want you getting rejected a million times, I said. “Because you are getting rejected that many times, it means that you are out there pursuing. And with that many attempts, some good things are sure to happen as well.

Remember, if failure is part of the process, then the more we fail, the more we are engaged in the process, and the more success we will find.

Persistence after failure is a huge key to success. The chapter coming up is on perseverance and persistence, so I won't address that subject in detail here. But we must include persistence in our thinking about failure because failure is exactly when persistence is needed. We don't need it when we succeed; we need it on the path to success when we have not yet gotten there. In looking at failure, we always need to remember that to reach the goal will require many, many efforts.

Step Eight: Have the Funeral

In spite of the positive aspects of failure, we must be realistic and face the fact that in some cases failure is nor merely a step in me accomplishment of a goal. It is a finality. The game is over. The company is bankrupt. The relationship has ended. There is no next step to be taken to make it work, because it is not going to work. It is the end of the road.

Winners know that and accept it. They embrace the failure and go through the grief process. They express their feelings about it, get angry and sad, grieve it, and move on. They do not do the useless things that keep people stuck, like chasing something dead that should be given up or sitting there protesting the reality of what is inevitable or has already occurred. Remember the example of the woman who had for thirty years remained bitter over the loss of her relationship. She should have had the funeral and moved on.

Solomon put it this way:

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.

Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure. (Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 NIV)

When your goal is alive and has a chance of succeeding, the right thing to do is persevere. But when it is over, the right thing to do is to go into a house of mourning. Sorrow, Solomon says, can he good for the heart. Mourning enables you to work through the loss, and then your heart will be available for new things. But if you don't lay the loss to rest and mourn it, then thy heart still holds to the dead dream and is not available to win the next time. The woman who had lost a cherished relationship at forty would not lay her loss to rest and mourn it. She clung to the useless ghost of a dead relationship and thus for thirty empty and bitter years was not available to a new one. As a result of her inability to grieve, this woman experienced a much bigger loss than the loss of a relationship. She could have lost a relationship but had a life. Instead, she lost a relationship and a life.

Look your failure or loss right in the eye, have the funeral, express your feelings, and kiss it goodbye. Remember what Jesus said about remembering Lot's wife. She could not let go of her old life, and therefore she turned to salt instead of achieving a new life.

When experiencing the death of a dream, remember that not everything is lost. If you have gone through the loss process wisely, you have gained something extremely valuable. You have gained experience, learning, character growth, and the tools you need to never have to go through that failure again. As God tells us, he can bring good out of all things, and he can cause your worst failure to work for your good. Even it all your hard effort ends in the failure of a cherished goal, it never ends in nothing if we respond in his way.

I like to look at it this way:

A winner owns his failure, and God owns his shame.

When we let God forgive us, comfort us, and be with us in the sting of failure, then we can face it and own it in the way that ultimately helps us. God takes the shame of it by offering us unconditional forgiveness and acceptance. Then we can grieve, not as those who have no hope, but as those who do have hope because we know that God is with us.

Step Nine: Learn that You Can Learn

There is a big difference between a victim and a winner. Victims see things the way they are and think they will always be that way because uncontrollable forces are acting upon them. But winners have a different attitude, especially about failure and trying something new to see if it works better. They know one of the most important things we can ever know: they know that they can learn.

If your hope lies in your abilities, then you are on precarious ground. For if your dream works out because you are able to accomplish it successfully, then all is well. But if you put everything you have into your dream and it does not turn out well, where is your hope then? You have come to the end of your ability, and there is nothing there but failure.

But if you have in your toolkit another instrument of hope--your ability to learn--then virtually nothing seems hopeless. If you can't accomplish your dream now, you can learn how to do it. Winners think this way every day, and it s not just some form of self--esteem jargon, its something much deeper than that. It is hope in the very nature of the way God created the universe and our relationship to it. It is like having hope in gravity.

God made humans with the ability to learn in a more complex way than any other creature. We can observe what we need to know to accomplish a goal, and then we can pursue that knowledge. We can learn with a purpose in mind. He gave us the ability not only to achieve the purpose, but also the ability to actually do the learning required to achieve it. You can learn to do what you need to do:

* A couple can learn to communicate.

* A depressed person can learn to overcome depression.

* A parent with a child out of control can learn how to discipline effectively.

* A person without a career can learn a new skill.

* A person with a weight problem can learn how to lose weight and keep it off

* A person without faith can learn about God.

* A person who gets a bad job review can learn to do better.

* A person with a pattern of failed relationships can learn the relationship skills that are needed.

* A person who picks bad people over arid over can learn why that happens and how to spot the bad ones.

When you know that you can learn, you don't need to feel stuck. You see failure as a step in getting to the end point because it shows you that there is some kind of information or skills or wisdom or knowledge that you need to learn in order to get there. And because you believe that you can learn, you are not hopeless, but empowered.

Every week John and I do a public seminar called “Solutions.” We have been doing it for years, and now it is available by satellite broadcast across the country, probably at a location near you. Exposure to thousands of people in these seminars has given us the opportunity to hear one thing over and over again. It is the theme of a person moving from hopelessness to fulfillment through learning God's ways to do life and putting then, into practice. We continually hear people say things like, “I had no hope when I first came here, and now everything is different.”

What is different? Did the world change? No, it is the same. What changed is this: they found the truth of Proverbs to be real when it says, “Know also that wisdom is sweet to your soul; if you find it, there is a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off” (Proverbs 24:14 NIV). Listen to that! It says to know this powerful source of hope: wisdom. Wisdom leads to hope.

If you believe that finding the wisdom needed for a certain situation will reveal an answer, then you will always have hope in the power of learning. It is a lesson that will serve you for the rest of your life.

Only the Best Fail

We often see people who remain in a stable job for ten, twenty, or thirty years. They may call their job a career, but it isn't really. Instead of experiencing newness and growth in each of those years, they relive the same year ten, twenty, or thirty times. In their thirtieth year they are no different from the way they were in their first year. They are not trying anything new, and they are not growing. It is the same old same old. Often they remain in stagnation and never step out of the rut because of a fear of failure. As a result, they never become the best at anything, or what is worse, they never achieve their own “personal best.” They refuse to fail, and only those who fail become the best.

Those who will not risk failure are very different from the others in stable jobs who have grown each year and learned a long the way. Their thirty years on the job are all different years, not the same year repeated over and over.

What would you do if your goal was a political career and the following things happened to you? The love of your life dies; you have a nervous breakdown; you fail as a businessman; you are defeated when you run for state legislator; you lose a job; you are defeated when you run for speaker of the state house; you are defeated for nomination to Congress; you lose a re-nomination; you are rejected to become a land officer; you are defeated for the U.S. Senate you are defeated for the nomination of vice president; you are again defeated for the Senate.

How would you feel? Would you withdraw from the race? Would you think you are a loser? Would you think you are nuts to believe you could ever accomplish anything in politic? Would you give up? Or, would you become president of the United States and one of most heralded leaders of all time, negotiating one of our country's most difficult periods of history and literally saving the country as we know it today? If you could handle failure, you would do exactly that. You would be Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln knew the truth of the Bible, which says, “For though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again, but the wicked are brought down by calamity” (Proverbs 24:16 NIV). With faith and the understanding that failure is not the end but common to all good people, you, too, can get up and rise to the heights that God desires for you. Who knows, you might even become president!