Feelings… Nothing More Than Feelings

EXPOSE | Feelings… nothing more than feelings

“Feeling like a failure has little correlation with actually failing… Here’s the essential first step: Stop engaging with the false theory that the best way to stop feeling like a failure is to succeed.” – Seth Godin

EXPLORE | Don’t Waste a Failure

If you read Seth’s blog, you know that he is short and to the point–which is one reason why I think he is so appealing.

This particular post reads like a good coach’s pep talk.  He points to what we should do with our feelings of failure, and that hurrying up and succeeding at something to not feel that way anymore is not how we should respond.

To this, I would encourage a proper vetting of how we feel.  The bottom line, we need to get to the truth.

Assuming a healthy definition of both success and failure, consider too that success doesn’t mean you’re not a failure.  That’s how far away we can be swept by our feelings.  Just because we succeed may or may not mean we’ve failed.  In other words, success may not at all be the right metric.  Failure, in fact, may benefit us more than we would be willing to admit.

Don’t waste a failure on how we feel, by ignoring it to instead take another run at the next “success.”

EXECUTE | Finding the Truth in Failure

While we don’t want to unnecessarily discount how we feel, we don’t ‘breakthrough’ when we only believe what we feel.

Feelings can, and will, distract us from the truth.  What we feel can change.  What doesn’t change is the truth.  Start there.  Know the truth–about yourself, and your situation–and believe it.  The truth sets us free from how we may be feeling when we actually believe it.  That’s the clincher.

Believing the truth is a crucial aspect that I think gets overlooked.  Otherwise, we can easily assume that we do when in reality we’ve only observed or just acknowledged the truth.

In this case, understand what we need to about why and how we failed, and believe the truth by applying the benefits of what we learned, which will keep us from overlooking the value of failure, and unnecessarily dwelling on our feelings.

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Further reading:

On feeling like a failure

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