Failure… is only God pointing us in another direction. Without failure, there is no success.

I find it amazing how many people allow failure to stop them in their tracks. If we truly look at the history of any successful person or inventor, we find that they failed repeatedly, and yet continued until they were successful. They knew that failure was like a compass, pointing them down the path that they needed to go down, tweeking the experiment, or changing their direction. They knew that failure is part of any success.

When we are afraid of failing, and we don’t see it as a positive thing, we don’t move, we don’t try, we don’t attempt that which our soul longs for. We actually become the failure that we are so fearful of, we fail to try, we fail to go forward in the direction that we are lead.

This fear of failure may have been taught to us by overly concerned parents. They wanted to protect us from failure, or they insisted on perfection, this caused us to be focused on our outcome and not the journey. In the process we find our way towards success, and failures are part of that process. They are the indicators which, if we pay attention to and adjust from, we move closer to our goals. When we don’t see the failures as part of the journey and we take them in as shame, we lose. We aren’t a failure, it’s that our process is just need some redirection.

I remember as a child, I had received straight A’s up until the 4th grade. I had a teacher that gave us an assignment to read 6 books and write 6 book reports. Well, I had misunderstood her and thought she said 5, so I read the 5 books and wrote up the same number of book reports. I loved to read and this was an enjoyable assignment for me and when I turned them in, I was proud of my work. To my devastation she gave me an “F”, not only on the assignment, but on my report card. I took that shame in, and allowed that failure to dictate many of my academic decisions and behaviors for years. It took a long time for me to finally let go of the shame from that failure. I certainly wish I had understood as a child that it was only a misunderstanding that I could correct by changing my mind about it, and letting go of the shame that took me in so many painful directions.

Thankfully, I was able to make those changes that allow me to make mistakes today, knowing that those errors are simply tools to guide me to the right and perfect places in my life. I am grateful, I am blessed.