Last week, my son went for a football match, and against expectations, their team lost the match. It was a devastating moment for him because the failure wasn’t expected. As soon as I got hold of the outcome of the match while in the office, I sent him the message below:
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My son,
Your mum told me about the outcome of your match and I would like to encourage you. Failure is not something one should be scared of. Failure has its lessons when you take it as a lesson moment. This is one of those moments where my personal failure experiences will be useful to you. Failure is not final until you let it be. What you should do is to be the leader in your team and identify where the failure is coming from. Go back to the drawing board and make use of the lessons next time. Please note that I am proud of all you do and we must continue with the hard work. I know your team will do better next time.
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Let me extract some points from my message to my son as you may have experienced some failures in recent times.
When you fail, the first thing you need is encouragement. You either have people around to encourage you or you encourage yourself. There is a way you encourage yourself which starts from the mind. Don’t ever see yourself as a failure; anyone may have called you one. Develop a success mentality that enables you to see failure as a temporary setback. So, pat yourself on the back and rise again for another challenge. Those who win in life are the ones who rise immediately after every defeat.
You must never be scared of failure. This does not mean you will expect to fail but it must be seen as part of the process of life. That you didn’t meet expectations today should not be a sign of downfall. We are all humans. We won’t always meet expectations. Hence, failure must not scare us.
Every failure has abundant lessons inside it. You must be circumspect enough to avoid losing the lessons of that failure experience. See the temporary setback as a moment to learn new things. Don’t waste the failure season. The lessons include what worked, what didn’t work, and what are the better ways of doing what we did. How can we improve the process? Was it the input that needs to be changed, or the process that requires improvement in order to change the outcome?
One of my personal experiences of failures was when I became an orphan in my second year in the university. I failed 4 courses and my GPA dropped from 4.10 to 3.10. Not only this, but also, I was failing every semester till I finished on campus. The details of this will be highlighted in other write-ups.
Failure is not final. You are the determinant of allowing the failure event to be your last event. You must always try again. Never allow failure to win. Fight back. Strike back. You must win at last but that is absolutely dependent on you.
And so, I advised my son to be the leader in the team by identifying where the failure is coming from. That counsel is not for him to take the place of the captain. That is rebellion. The counsel was for him to have the eye for details. See what others do not see. Advise the team, the captain and the coach on what you have identified and proffer solutions. That makes you the leader without a title.
Every failure moment requires you to go back to the drawing board. Think through it. To get out of failure requires a lot of programming. Keep tuning the process until you get it right.
I told my son that I am proud of him. If you have anyone around you who failed or who is currently failing at something. Don’t deride them. Don’t scorn them. Pull them close. Hug them, encourage them. They need all the support they can get.
Above all, to get out of failure, we must continue to put in the hard work. There are some failures that are very stubborn. You may need to work twice as hard to get pass the last failure. It is real hard work and you must continue to put it in.