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WISDOM & PHILOSOPHY LINKS

• http://www.how-to-be-happy.co.uk - discover how easy it is to introduce greater and prolonged happiness.
• www.peoplestuff.com.au Phil Evans; based in Newcastle, Australia. He has a regular newsletter that encourages a new train of thought.
• http://www.agiftofinspiration.com.au/inspiremail/index.shtml Keith Ready; based in Australia. He provides stories of inspiration.
• Wisdom of Jagad Guru Chris Butler
•  Mentoring UK - Mentoring Forum, blogs, articles, TV channel, Maps …

HERE IS A SAMPLE NEWSLETTER...

1. INTRODUCTION to our subject – To Recover from Failure

To recover from failure suggests almost that there is something wrong with failure.

Life CAN be so much better if we programme our tools of perception

At the very least each time you fail you learn a valuable lesson; it maybe that you learn not to do what you did that way again. Or more likely you realise that there is so much more to learn from that failure than what you had originally thought. Either way you get to learn. Plus the very ‘experience’ of failure has incredible value; so rather than allow failure to depress us we should consider the value.

If you could accept that, failure will never be so much of a problem anymore.

We are all too aware how failure can grip our very souls and twist our fortune. How it can make us unhappy and sad, how it can create a legacy that lives with us for the rest of our lives.

We can either wallow in the sadness of defeat never venturing beyond our front door again, or we can SEE it from a completely different perspective.

Failure often leads to unhappiness, which in itself is a symptom of forgetfulness, as much as joy is a symptom of remembering.

Wouldn’t it be a valuable asset to your personal philosophy if you could change your perspective and find some advantages within a defeat or a failure?

If you answered YES, then with no intention of offending you, if you do not remember this week’s editorial when the next bout of failure occurs you will have the symptom of forgetfulness which will lead to unhappiness. I would assume therefore that we all want happy rather than sad.

The ability to change your perspective, if used to enhance your life, will bring happiness rather than misery.

So HOW we view failure is how it affects us.

Little do we realize that this is a topic everyone gets involved in every week. No matter how much of an expert you are in your job, being a failure may crop up somewhere else in your life.

Let’s take an extreme example to clarify a point. Would we assume that a 25-year-old, who possesses a degree in Nuclear Physics, would be deemed as a success? Would we assume that someone who is a talented computer wizard, that can earn say £50,000 per year is a success? Ok… on the whole we would, but what about the rest of their life? They may not understand how a vacuum cleaner works, their garden may be overgrown, they maybe cannot cook, their house may be untidy, and those DIY jobs may be just bodged as temporary rather than permanent?

When we consider failure we consider major events, when in reality it also happens in smaller ways each and every day. We may fail at pouring the milk onto our breakfast cereal without splashing it onto the table. We may fail at judging the time we give for a certain task. We may fail at judging the reaction someone may give to our criticism.

Two important factors to remember in relation to the small and big failures are these:- Firstly the intensity of the backlash and the depth of despair that follows will correspond directly to the proportion of the failure. Small will equal a moment of sadness whereas large could keep us depressed for months.

Secondly and most important is the recovery. This isn’t affected by size. What happens is that you ACCEPT, CONSIDER and ACT. You can complicate this by splitting each heading into further sub headings, but rather than do this I’m sure you can understand the basic principle.

To recover from a small failure is something you already do on a daily basis. Accept, consider and act. Yet when you become involved in a bigger failure your balance is lost and you tumble into a depressive emotion.

Edison, the inventor, took over 2,000 attempts to invent the light bulb. With each one of those failures his resolve could have been weakened; but his determination led him forward. He accepted defeat, considered the lessons he had learnt and proceeded with his next action.

Bear in mind of course the sequence, you cannot change it. Let me explain why…

You can consider before you accept, but the consideration would be futile. Let me illustrate with an example.

Let me use an unsportsmanlike conduct as an illustration:

A soccer player was running down the wing with possession of the ball. A defender slid across the slippery grass surface to tackle the winger. It was almost as if the defender had ploughed the winger to the ground in a heap. The winger had failed in his attempt to cross the ball into a dangerous scoring position.

As the winger had been ploughed to the ground, the force he hit the floor caused a certain anger. His first thought was to retaliate in a brutish way by chasing the defender and charging him to the floor intentionally.

In this illustration we see consideration and action, but no acceptance.

Acceptance must be first! We all use this principle in our small disappointments, yet we remain unsuccessful in our application of acceptance, during the low emotion, after our bigger failures.

Acceptance is the single most important aspect.

Allow this excerpt to clarify how acceptance would have kept this man his job…

Adapted from “Broken by Blame, Lifted by Love”, David Ridge
 
“Six years imprisoned by blame was quite enough for me, but I cursed the bars that held me, not realizing that my freedom only required that I merely walk out the door of the prison that I had built.

In 1981 I was “dismissed” from a software company at which I had worked for seven years. A growing disagreement with the president of this company became a rift that would not soon be healed. As this rift evolved into my being fired, I saw two of my close friends, fellow members of the executive staff of the company, abandon me to my fate. I felt betrayed by their abandonment. This feeling only deepened when, soon after my separation, one of my “friends” took my position as VP of Sales, the other became President of the company soon thereafter.”

(David Ridge)

This man had been dismissed and deemed himself a failure through not working through his rift with the president of the company. As a consequence this failure almost disabled his ability to apply for other jobs. He imprisoned himself! Had he accepted the blame for his own actions he wouldn’t have lost six years.

Never underestimate how powerful acceptance is. For whatever reason you resist acceptance, that opposition seems irresponsible the moment you’ve accepted.

Imagine a deep emotional turmoil, and one thing you can guarantee is the equally deep and strange decisions you make whilst you’re amongst it. The rut you’re in has slippery sides and a way out is unlikely. Why? Because the emotion is giving you tunnelled vision. Decisions made in this state of mind are weird and wonderful.

Yet if you ACCEPTED the reason for the failure was YOU and decided to be positive by considering how best to benefit from all the mistakes that happened. The next ACTION you take would catapult you out of the doldrums.

So to conclude, to recover from failure you must first ACCEPT, then CONSIDER the alternatives and take ACTION.

The beauty of using this technique is that it educates you to also accept an incorrect action before you stare failure in the face.

And now onto this weeks story…

2. STORY

SPIRIT

There were two men both whom decided to get a horse. One man found a red Rhone with much spirit. The other chose one more docile. They would go riding together every day. It so happened on the route they would take around the countryside, there was a ditch about eight or nine feet wide, after a time it was apparent that the Rhone's spirit could not be shaken and he gave everything he had in all he did. When coming up to this gap in the trail he hurled it the first time. Because of the spirit in him he was quick to respond and jumped it with no problem. Yet the more docile horse would balk every time he came to the edge. He wasn't sure of the distance; he would stand on the edge trembling with indecision and doubt because the distance to him looked too great. Then one day after awhile, coming up to the ditch and watching his companion take it with ease, something happened within him, a knowing was born that he could too. So with agility and ease he gracefully bounded over the barrier.

Life is much like the two horses. When we as people come up against trials or situations we just don't feel like we can make the distance or that it just is too big and we don't know if we'll make it. So we balk standing on the edge trembling. It's not until we depend upon the spirit within. Then we are able to make it with ease. Until we quit looking at the obstacle or trial through our eyes, they will always seem too big for us. But there is a spirit within us that can judge the distance to the other side and will give us the strength to make it through it.

As long as we let it.

It all comes to a choice whether we look for the spirit within or just stand on the edge and balk. We will always have a choice.

(John R. Ware)

3. EVERYDAY EXAMPLE

LEARNING TO GET BACK UP

Bringing a giraffe into the world is a tall order. A baby giraffe falls 10 feet from its mother's womb and usually lands on its back. Within seconds it rolls over and tucks its legs under its body. From this position it considers the world for the first time and shakes off the last vestiges of the birthing fluid from its eyes and ears. Then the mother giraffe rudely introduces its offspring to the reality of life.

In his book, A View from the Zoo, Gary Richmond describes how a new born giraffe learns its first lesson.

The mother giraffe lowers her head long enough to take a quick look. Then she positions herself directly over her calf. She waits for about a minute, and then she does the most unreasonable thing. She swings her long, pendulous leg outward and kicks her baby, so that it is sent sprawling head over heels.

When it doesn't get up, the violent process is repeated over and over again. The struggle to rise is momentous. As the baby calf grows tired, the mother kicks it again to stimulate its efforts. Finally, the calf stands for the first time on its wobbly legs.

Then the mother giraffe does the most remarkable thing. She kicks it off its feet again. Why? She wants it to remember how it got up. In the wild, baby giraffes must be able to get up as quickly as possible to stay with the herd, where there is safety. Lions, hyenas, leopards, and wild hunting dogs all enjoy young giraffes, and they'd get it too, if the mother didn't teach her calf to get up quickly and get with it.

The late Irving Stone understood this. He spent a lifetime studying greatness, writing novelized biographies of such men as Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.

Stone was once asked if he had found a thread that runs through the lives of all these exceptional people. He said, "I write about people who sometime in their life have a vision or dream of something that should be accomplished and they go to work.

"They are beaten over the head, knocked down, vilified, and for years they get nowhere. But every time they're knocked down they stand up. You cannot destroy these people. And at the end of their lives they've accomplished some modest part of what they set out to do."

(Craig B. Larson, Adapted from "Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching from Leadership Journal, Baker Books)

4. RESPONDING TO YOUR QUESTIONS

QUESTION: “You’ve almost implied on several occasions that we can advance in our life by making mistakes. I don’t fully understand?”

ANSWER: Every action is an opportunity. A mistake is an action. A mistake therefore is an opportunity. You either wallow in the sadness of your mistake (negative), or you take advantage of the lesson the mistake has brought upon you (positive).

Your next action can be either a positive or negative action, the choice is yours. So if you make a mistake do you continue with blinkers or wake up and see the full view?

Here is a story that helps the theory along a little bit. It doesn’t illustrate exactly what has already been implied, but it helps. But remember if you make a mistake and wallow in the sadness you’ll never see the good in it.

THE SILVER LINING

The only Survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small, uninhabited Island.

Exhausted, he eventually gathered what he could and managed to build a little hut out of driftwood to protect himself from the elements, and to store his few possessions. He prayed feverishly to be rescued, and everyday he scanned the horizon for help, but none seemed forthcoming.

Then one day he left his fire burning in his hut, and went out scavenging for food as was his routine. Upon returning home he found his little hut in flames, the smoke rolling up to the sky. The worst had happened. Everything was lost. He was stunned with anger and grief. "God, how could you do this to me!" he cried. "How could you let this happen!!"

Early the next day, however, he was awakened by the sound of a ship that was approaching the island. It had come to rescue him. "How did you know I was here?" asked the weary man of his rescuers. "We saw your smoke signal" they replied.

It is easy to get discouraged when things seem to be going wrong. But no matter what happens, it's "How you take it" that, to a large extent, determines your happiness and outlook. One of the great secrets of life is to look for the "silver lining" in the smoking remains of adversity.

(Unknown Author)

5. PHILOSOPHICAL QUOTES

“If the wind will not serve you, take to the oars.” (Latin Proverb)

“Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of ENTHUSIASM. Nothing great was ever achieved without it.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
(George Moore)

Next week we look at the subject ‘Blame’.

Bye for now.

PS: “It isn’t what you have, but what you do with what you have that defines your success.” (Eva Gregory)
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Phil Booker
Editor, Author, Businessman and Philosopher of Life.

 

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