Having coached hundreds of people in the becurrent methodology, I’ve had the rare privilege to look under the hood of many lives: people’s earnest dreams, their hopes, fears, doubts, struggles, celebrations and failings – are all always on display.
What strikes me most is the relationship people have with themselves, how they respond to what life throws at them, and how deeply that affects their ability to deliver a life that brings joy. Or not.
It reminds me of a line in a poem my dad had on his office wall the whole time I knew him:
If, by Rudyard Kipling.
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same …”
From what I’ve seen, external circumstances are not as influential as you might think. The art of failing begins with not looking at it as failure. Believe it or not, successful people seem to fail more than most; they just pick themselves up one more time than they fall. They’re clear about what matters to them, and they go after it. They seem to consider failing as just part of the process. They expect it. It says nothing about them.
Failure would be to quit something that mattered, or not quit something that didn’t.