Your Biggest Mistake Isn’t Asking What Mistake You’re Making (The View Point Summary Of Failing Forward from Dr. John C.Maxwell)

Success doesn’t mean avoiding failure. All of us fail. As we travel, we all hit potholes, take wrong turns, or forget to check the radiator. The only person who avoids failure altogether is the person who never leaves his/her driveway. So the real issue is not whether you’re going to fail. It’s whether you’re going to fail Successfully (profiting from your failure). The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views mistakes. If you want to continue on the success journey, you need to learn to fail forward.
So, when failure gets you by the heart. Let’s face it. Failure can be very painful, sometimes physically and more often emotionally. Seeing part of your vision fall flat really hurts. And if people heap ridicule on top of your hurt feelings, you feel even worse. The first important step in weathering failure is learning to not personalize it – making sure you know that your failure doesn’t make you a failure. But there’s more to it than that. For many people the pain of failure leads to fear of failure. And they become like the person who says, “I’m too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh.” That’s when many people stuck in the fear cycle. And if fear overcomes you, it’s almost impossible to fail forward.
If you can take action and keep making mistakes, you gain experience. That experience eventually brings competence, and you make fewer mistakes. As a result, your fear becomes less paralyzing. But the whole cycle-breaking process starts with action. You must act your way into feeling, not wait for positive emotions to carry you forward.
To leave the road of continual failure, a person must first utter the three most difficult words to say: “I Was Wrong“. He/she has to open his/her eyes, admit his/her mistakes, and accept complete responsibility for his current wrong actions and attitudes. Every failure you experience is a fork in the road. It’s an opportunity to take the right action, learn from your mistakes, and begin again. Mistakes really do pave the road to achievement. Here is an acronym that was created by Dr. John C. Maxwell to help us keep mistakes in perspective. Mistakes are ...................

Messages that give us feedback about life.
Interruptions that should cause us to reflect and think.
Signposts that direct us to the right path.
Tests that push us toward greater maturity.
Awakenings that keep us in the game mentally.
Keys that we can use to unlock the next door of opportunity.
Explorations that let us journey where we’ve never been before.
Statements about our development and progress.

Successful people don’t let failure go their heads. Instead of dwelling on the negative consequences of failure, thinking of what might have been and how things haven’t worked out, they focus on the rewards of success. Learning from their mistakes and thinking about how they can improve themselves and their situations. “Try to see failure as a learning experience today”.
No matter how difficult your problems were, the key to overcoming them is in changing yourself. That in itself is a process, and it begins with a desire to be teachable. From this moment on, make a commitment to do whatever it takes to Fail Forwad. “ Maintain a teachable attitude in everything you do today”.