How Do You Manage Failure? Part II

Failure, as everyone knows, is an unlooked for and unwelcome commodity in life.  It disrupts our plans, impedes our progress, upsets our feelings and is generally intrusive to our lives.  As a result of failure’s glowing resume, we often do whatever we can to avoid it, and when we experience it we often try to soft-pedal its impact or even hide its presence.  All in all, these descriptions of and reactions to failure are really quite unfortunate.  Failure gets too bad a rap.  It is judged too harshly.  A few weeks ago we began a journey towards a better understanding of failure.  In that journey we began to see the place that failure holds in our lives and the value that it can bring us.  Let’s get back to it, for success begins when we understand our failures!

In Part 1 of this podcast we talked about failure due to a lack of knowledge and failure due to immaturity. When you think about it, these two types of failure are the easiest to deal with as they can be overcome in well defined ways. If you have a lack of knowledge, you just need to find the right knowledge for next time. If you are immature and fail the remedy is well defined but not necessarily easy. Grow up some and find success. Either way the path to success passes through the manageable obstacles of time, learning and practice.

The next two paths to failure are a different story. Next on the list is failure due to weakness. This is a situation where you already know better, you have already been able to do better but you fail anyway. This kind of failure is more personal, because it hits you in a way that can be embarrassing and humiliating. No more can you use the excuse that you didn’t know or you hadn’t yet learned. No, this time you have a more complete responsibility in the failure. Dealing with such failure requires not only greater humility but it also requires greater effort as now you not only have to add to your knowledge and experience base you now also have to take some things away in order to beat it. Not easy, not fun, but oh, so necessary.

Before introducing the next and by far the most difficult path to failure, we need to put the question out there – is our eternal destiny judged based upon our weaknesses? If you think the answer is yes, then I would ask you to listen in, as our conversation deals directly and scripturally with this, and our answer is different. Most importantly, we believe our answer is biblically sound.

Finally, we explored the most difficult type of failure – failure due to choice. Here we have and understand the knowledge we need to succeed, we are clearly mature enough to recognize and follow the path to success and we have proven to be strong enough to get through the obstacles along our way. The trouble is…we don’t want to. We decide on a different path and a different approach that suits our ego and preference. What then? Check out our July 10, 2017 podcast, “How Do You Manage Failure? Part 2″ and find out. This really is a “need to know” matter!