How Strong Is Your Bounceback?

Provided by: Raise Your Game

The reason I'm so passionate about embracing failure is that I used to shy away from it. In fact, it wasn't until I was in my early thirties that I changed my mindset to accept my mistakes as valuable, as a necessary part of the process. No one gets it right every time. So the question isn't whether or not you will fail, as everyone inevitably does. It's how you respond. How you deal with failure determines your ultimate happiness and success. Let's call it your bounceback.

Apple's Steve Jobs will forever be hailed as a visionary genius, but the story about him that gets told most often is how he was fired from the company he built, only to return and save it twelve years later, turning it into one of the most successful and important brands on the planet. To his credit, Jobs didn't bury that part of his biography; he often retold the story himself, because he understood it was the foundation of his future success. Failure only becomes positive or negative based on how you frame it and how you personalize it. The exact same failure can inspire you, motivate you, and teach you, or it can crush you, debilitate you, and paralyze you. It is a matter of choice.

Failure is about walking headfirst into "no," into adversity, into discomfort. We must condition ourselves to embrace it and thrive from it. I'm grateful to have gotten a lot of yeses in my life. And almost all of them have come after countless nos. As a professional speaker, I hear no on a daily basis; I think of it as just part of my workday. But I have always felt that every "no" gets me closer to a "yes." If you are constantly getting yeses, then you aren't pushing hard enough. If you didn't lose the ball, then you haven't learned anything.

It's up to you how you choose to feel about and perceive your misses. It goes back to the growth mindset. Those who see failures as walls will do nothing to get past them. Those who see them as doors will do the work to get them open.