Clear business

In my life I have had many successes. I rarely learned a lot insightful lessons from them. Growing up I had the opportunity at a young age to get involved with different organizations and take on various leadership positions. I got so good in each place that by the time I left I was able to leave a mark in both my local community and across that state. One specific example was as a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol at the beginning of my teen years.

The United States Air Force has a program to help young kids learn about aerospace education and service to your community. Within four years I was able to get involved, get trained, and build up a team of leaders that would help us go from a nobody to being the best in the state and region and one of the most respected squadrons in the country. During this time I was also able to take my skills and apply them all over my community, gaining respect from various city leaders and even getting asked to join an advising group which flew me out to take a look at what other city governments were doing and how it can be implemented in my home city.

You might think that with having this success I would be able to do anything and to an extent this is true. The unfortunate truth is that as I grew older I began to fade away from the principles that gave me that success and inevitably learned that in order to lead people who put their lives, their incomes, and ultimately their trust in you takes considerably more skill but must always come from the very basics of what I knew about leading people. The more I got caught up in complex models and thoughts, the further away from success I went.

My first business project after High School started when I was 18. It was working with a group of people to build an organization that is still around today. After 4 years of roller coaster success I realized that in changing how I lead people I changed the wrong things. Had I been successful in my initial business after college I would have never realized this.

You see failure is an opportunity for self evaluation. It let’s you see very vividly why you aren’t where you want to be. It shows you if you actually gave your best, it allows you to understand where other people are coming from. The sad part is that many of us make failure a habit not an event. Some of us take a look at what we did wrong and do it again. We then lose faith in ourselves and our abilities to reach our goals and dreams when in fact in looking at a self assessment we should be satisfied if we can look ourselves in the eye and say “Yes, I did give this my all.”

Failure is often times the worlds’ way of showing us our character and our drive. Think of it this way. Professional athletes and salesmen fail on a consistent basis. Basketball players miss more shots than they make, baseball players make strikes more than hits (and the home run hitters more often than someone going for the singles or doubles). Yet the ones who are most successful are the ones who say to themselves “self, I didn’t get this one, and that’s ok. This doesn’t define who I am it’s simply the way things are. I will continue to give my all and continue to get better.” So are you letting failure stop you?

Mikhail Hutton is founder of The HIL Group, a leadership think tank that helps people and organizations manage the change associated with growth and transition. Visit his website at http://thehilgroup.com/ or his blog at http://www.thehilgroup.typepad.com/

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Why Failure Isn’t so Bad