Lesson Mining

Are you leveraging your failure for success?

Failure. It hurts, it’s no fun, and we all experience it. When faced with the realization that our efforts have fallen short, there is usually a wave of emotion that comes over us. We may feel sad, frustrated, angry, disappointed, or resentful about what has occurred.

Today, I want to give you a secret of success that highly successful, confident women use in their personal and professional lives. This secret is one that will take you from good to great in every area of your life and help you create the life of your dreams. In fact, with the use of this secret, you’ll never truly fail again. How does that sound? You’ll have the leverage you need to evolve into a woman who wins over and over.

The secret is something I call Lesson Mining. It’s a process that involves mining your failures and looking for lessons and cues that will make you more effective in the present and the future. Think for a moment about some of your biggest failures. Did you learn anything from them? I always say that if I have to endure a failure, I’m going to learn a lot from it and make it work for me to earn me many successes in the future. The key to leveraging your failure for success is to accept the failure, resolve to move past it, and then look objectively at the sequence of events. When we are able to lift our emotions from the situation, we can begin to gain clarity on what led to the unfavorable outcome.

Once we’ve mined for lessons, we can create objective success strategies. Objective success strategies are like a map on our path to success to help us make empowered decisions and create amazing lives.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say you lost a major deal because you failed to communicate an important detail and the other party didn’t have enough information to feel comfortable closing the deal. Later, you realize that you left the detail out. You feel frustrated and angry with yourself for not including the detail. Once you’ve calmed down, you mine for lessons.

Your objective success strategies may look something like this: Err on the side of including details. Communicate clearly and ask questions to check for understanding. Follow up on communications to answer any questions.

With the above lessons in place, you can apply those lessons to other areas of your life to prevent repeat failures and create amazing success. If every failure is a stepping stone to success, then you are always getting better and growing. Next time you experience a perceived failure, process your emotions, then move on and mine for the lessons! Use the objective success strategies to help you create your next success.