Brian Tracy contrasts how victims and winners handle failure. He says the key is confessing doubts to someone who supports you, accepting mistakes fast, cutting losses, and learning quickly enough to adapt and win.
November 7, 2019.
70% of all decisions we make will be wrong.
Hello, I'm Brian Tracy, and today I want to talk to you about how to handle mistakes and failure in your life. One of my favorite questions is that if you're absolutely guaranteed of success in any task or goal, large or small, what great goal would you set for yourself? Everyone tends to make mistakes, and the busier you are, the more mistakes you will make. The only question is, do you stay positive and keep moving forward from life's inevitable ups and downs? Here's how you can learn to maintain positive thinking and benefit from your failures in the face of adversity. First, for you to truly understand yourself and to move forward from the troubling things that may have happened in your past, you have to be able to share any doubts that you have from the past. You have to be able to get those things off your chest with at least one other person. You must rid yourself of those thoughts and feelings by revealing them to someone who won't make you feel guilty or ashamed for what has happened next. You must remain positive. There are two ways to look at the the benevolent or positive way or the malevolent or negative way. People with a malevolent or negative worldview take a victim mentality, seeing life as a continuous succession of problems and a procession of unfairness and oppression. They can't move forward, they don't expect a lot, and they don't get much. When things go wrong, they shrug their shoulders and passively accept that this is just the way life is and there isn't anything that they can do to make it better. On the other hand, people who practice positive thinking, a benevolent worldview, see the world around them as filled with opportunities and possibilities. They believe that everything happens as part of a great process designed to make them successful and happy. They approach their lives, their work, and their relationships with optimism, cheerfulness, and a general attitude of positive thinking and expectations. They stay positive, expect a lot, and are seldom disappointed. When you develop this skill, you become the kind of person who welcomes obstacles and setbacks as opportunities to flex your mental muscles and move forward. You look at problems as rungs on the ladder of success that you grab onto as you pull yourself higher and higher. Two of the most common ways to deal with failure are invariably fatal to high achievement. The first common but misguided way to handle a mistake is the failure to accept it. When it occurs, 70% of all decisions we make will be wrong. That's just an average. This means that some people will fail more than 70% of the time, and some people will fail less. It's hard to believe that most of the decisions we make could turn out to be wrong in some way. In fact, if this is the case, how can our society continue to function at all? And this brings me to my next point. Cut your losses. The fact is that our society, our families, our companies and our relationships continue to survive and thrive because intelligent people tend to to cut their losses, stay positive, and minimize their mistakes. It's only when people refuse to accept that they have made a bad choice or decision and prolong the consequences by sticking to that bad choice or decision that mistakes become extremely expensive and hurtful. Finally, learn from your mistakes and improve the second common approach that people take with regard to their mistakes, one that hurts innumerable lives and careers, is the failure to use your mistakes to better yourself and to improve the quality of your mind and your thinking. Learning from your mistakes is an essential skill that enables you to move forward, stay positive, and develop the resilience to be a master of change rather than a victim of change. The person who recognizes that he or she has made a mistake and changes direction the fastest is the one who will win. In an age of increasing information technology and competition, by remaining fast on your feet, you will be able to outplay and out position your competition. You will become a creator of circumstances rather than a creature of circumstances. Now I'd love to hear from you. So my question today is this. Tell me about a mistake you made and what did you learn from it? Leave a comment below and I'll be sure to follow up with you. Thanks for watching. And remember, if you want to change your future, take action and take action now. If you enjoyed this video and feel it was valuable in teaching you about learning from your failures, subscribe to my channel like this video and share this video with your friends. Don't forget to click the button on the screen for a free gift. Thanks again for watching.
