This week’s question from our portal “Ask Us Anything” comes from Lindsay.
You were talking recently about embracing failure—and if something doesn’t work out, we shouldn’t take it personally, because it doesn’t have anything to do with us. What are the best strategies for not taking things personally?
I feel like I’m taking things personally because I have a lot of internal self-pressure that things should be happening faster in my business. I keep focusing on, “When is it going to happen?” or “How will it happen?”
First off… “faster” is a lack-based idea, for the most part. It comes from the fear of loss or not getting what you want.
A person can speed things up once they understand the fundamentals of what they’re doing. If you’re in the process of still learning the fundamentals of what you’re doing, you have to be willing to go through that process in order to master it enough to be able to speed up.
It’s like if you were learning to play the piano—you wouldn’t be able to play very fast when you first start learning. But once you master the basics of playing, then you can work on speeding up.
Getting frustrated around it, is NOT going to speed anything up. It’s going to make things worse.
As far as taking things personally… first of all realize that when you were a kid, somebody indicated that your self-worth was based on the result you got, and that’s completely incorrect. It isn’t.
When a person takes something personally, they’re basically saying, “I’m not good enough because of this result that I got.” That’s an incorrect assumption.
In order to not take something personally, realize what actually builds your self-esteem—it’s being able to look intelligently at your results, understand why you got those results, then work through it to get a different result.
Making mistakes is part of the learning process. The only way we learn anything is by making mistakes. This true for every human being.
We learned that it was “bad” to make mistakes in school. When kids made mistakes, the teacher had to take “time out” from teaching the class, so they could help you fix your mistake. Because they had to get lots of kids through the teaching—it put more pressure on the teacher.
Every single thing you’ve ever learned in your life came with making mistakes. Whether you were learning to talk, walk, feed yourself, or dress yourself, you made mistakes all the way through until you mastered the activity.
It has nothing to do with who you are as a person.
The only thing that has anything to do with who you are as a person is if you quit because you feel bad about making mistakes. There’s nothing personal to take on for yourself.
