How Can I Turn Failure Into Success?

Road to Success

In my last article, I described failure as something that society has taught us is bad and wrong and must be avoided at all costs. The way that this is done is through a system called Shame where you are taught not to love and value, appreciate, and honor yourself. Rather you are taught to judge yourself and others, and to see yourself as a flawed, unworthy, human being.

I explained that failure is nothing more than a signal to you that you have missed something in your creation. That somehow the direction that you are going needs to open up to some other possibilities or maybe even in a different direction.

I also spoke about the way we have learnt to handle the judgments that hold failure in place is to build a façade which is an image that you set up to convince other people that you are more than you are, or that you are not affected by the humiliations of life.

How can you turn failure into success? The way to get rid of shame and failure is to start with yourself and take all the judgments off of you because that’s what you are afraid of. You are afraid of other people judging you, and you are afraid of you judging yourself. The message of failure is that something is wrong with you. So when you have a setback, don’t get sucked into that message. You did nothing wrong and nobody else did anything wrong either. Take the judgments off.

You also have to give up the façade. As long as you think you have something to hide, that if somebody were to see it, they would not like you anymore, you are living in duplicity. You are living in duality. In a duality, you have opposites. You are going to have black and white, good and bad, failure and success. As long as you want people to see you in a way that you feel you are not but you have got to appear that way, then you are keeping failure and success as dynamics in place.

Anytime that you have a setback of any sort, it is message to say, “Hey, you’ve missed a piece.” Maybe also, that’s not a good way to go. Maybe, you need to try it some other way. It doesn’t mean that you are dumb and stupid. It means that you are in a creative process. Acknowledge that you are a reality creator who is smart and powerful and strong, who is in their art studio creating a piece of art. Do you know how sloppy that can get? It is complex. It is messy. It is juicy. It evolves. If you will take all the Shame and the judgments off, then you will create safety to allow yourself to make mistakes.

If you look at it from the point of view that you are not going to fail but that this is your playground where you are creating something that you want to do because you want to play with it so that you can learn about it and know about it, then you never have to go into that shame place about being a failure. You will never even be tempted to go there again.

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What’s Up With Failure

Failure In Hand

Failure is a scary term. It means that you could make a mistake, that you could humiliate or even embarrass yourself in front of other people. It means you could be rejected—but the ultimate failure is that you could be abandoned. So as we are taught these things as children, we learn that, “If I fail, I will not be loved; therefore, I must not fail.” In other words, “I must succeed in order to survive.”

The definition of failure in our culture is you do not create and manifest what it is that you are going after. Somehow, you lose it, or something falls apart and you don’t get what it is you are desiring.

Furthermore, in our culture, we look down on people who fail and we look up to people who succeed. Failure is a definition that is based on judgments. Judgments by other people such as, “Oh, so and so is such a loser. She’s a nice gal but she just can’t seem to get her act together.” Also, judgments on yourself, such as, “I always do this! Why am I such a stupid klutz?” We judge ourselves as failures if we don’t get something. Society will say you are a failure if you don’t achieve something. You are afraid of being labeled a failure, so you think, “If I could succeed, if I could be competent, if I could get my life together then I will appear smart and people will respect me.” Therefore you create a façade because you don’t want people to see your mistakes, your idiosyncrasies or to see you as a failure. This is an agenda. Failure is held in place by agendas. And it is this motivation that keeps the whole matrix of failure and success in place.

Now, why would we do that to ourselves and each other? In my last article, I wrote about the ultimate darkness called Shame. Shame is the perception that you are an unworthy, stupid, incompetent piece of crap. Shame says that you are not divine by nature and that lack of divinity creates separation, alienation and judgments on yourself and judgments on others. So it makes perfect sense in a world where we are taught this about ourselves.

But do you know that failure actually has a positive use? Failure is a signal that somehow or another, you’ve missed something in your creation. It’s telling you that a piece of the puzzle is missing and you need to go back and redefine and reevaluate and rechoose. That’s it. That’s all. It doesn’t mean that you are bad and wrong. It’s really important to understand that society has defined what failure is and trained us to believe it. Now it’s time for you to redefine it for yourself.