We can do very strange things around our life’s successes and failures.
Yet with the minimum of change and self-discipline, we can transform our lives.
And it involves two simple and opposite thinking tricks for it to work wonders
for us.
With successes, which can be frequent if we are a champion sports star,
but for most of us such achievements stand out in our lives as unique and
especially rewarding memories – that is, if we let them stand out at all.
There is a weird affliction surrounding success from which many of us
suffer. What are its symptoms?
Memory loss when it comes to remembering the success, when one would
have thought we never would have forgotten it. .
Another symptom can be an adopted delusion that the success was a freak
or a stroke of luck and therefore cannot somehow be treated as a real success
after all. Worse, we can compound this reticence on the odd occasion we are
actually reminded by someone about our previous success, by denying it
happened, or by seeking to change the subject, lest our embarrassment at the
reminder of our being successful gets the better of us - not the other person,
who seems to want to talk about it..
Yet, to feed our sense of effectiveness, to enhance and grow our
self-esteem, we should be doing the very opposite and reminding ourselves of every
success we have had and even every near-success.
We are a very impressionable species, far too easily conditioned in our
thinking. Underplay or understate the significance of the successes we have had
in our life and effectively we are undermining our own image of ourselves..
We should remind ourselves daily to feed our impressionable minds with
positive reminders of how well we did; how we prepared for the success; how we
actually achieved the success. This not only sponsors our sense of self-worth
once more, but it puts us in a much more effective frame of mind to succeed
again tomorrow, next week and next month.
Vital is it, if we are an employer that we benefit from the positive
efforts of our staff. Yet it is just as important for them, that we remind each
and any one of them of their successes in their work or in their life generally
- and keep reminding them.
If we are parents or grand-children, then congratulating children and
grandchildren, itemising the traits and elements of their success, reminding
them on an on-going basis builds their opinion of themselves.
We should do it with our partners too.
So – in handling success, does this give us a clue on how most of us
handle failure? I wish!!
Don’t we forget, play down and change the subject on our life’s
failures, just like we do with success? Wouldn’t that be consistent behaviour?
NO! NO! Most of us don’t do that at all. We remember our failures. We
burnish their memory onto the very fabric of our minds. We recall the sense of
failure we felt at the time, the anguish, the embarrassment, the loss of
self-respect.
And we do it repeatedly, often for years after, when we are still alive
to tell the tale and had other lesser dramas which tested us but somehow we got
through.
So what we do here then? Do we try to blot the whole episode and all its
aftermath out of our minds?
It’s “No!” to a lot of that that too!
What we need to do is to forget the failure itself and pledge to ourselves
that we will give it no time in our thoughts in our lives ahead. But it is
fundamental at the same time that we should focus on how we got over the
failure; how we recovered and re-established ourselves.
Better still we should go a stage further and remind ourselves that
while success cannot be guaranteed, getting though and past failure can. This
is true particularly if we adopt a mentality which makes us search for ways out
of a dilemma, rather than wallow in it..
There it is then. Too many of us forget our successes when we should
remind ourselves of them constantly – and remind others of their successes.
Equally, too many of us waste time and emotional energy reminding ourselves of
our failures, when we should blot those memories out by recalling how we
recovered from the disappointment and re-established ourselves.
Good luck and don’t hesitate to keep doing this to restore your sense of
self-worth and self-esteem.
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