Failure occurs when an individual is unable to match their habits with the demands of their environment. Failure causes stress and sometimes injury. I will elaborate more on injury in a subsequent article, but there are different levels of injury and different care depending on how down someone is. Repeated failure can embed patterns of failure into our neurons. Relationship or career failures can be some of the most difficult injuries to recover from, with those two areas of life being the first and second most important areas of our life.
Embedding a pattern of success and winning into our neurons is important whether we are working on personal growth or recovery from injury. Even though there are a lot of pop culture references to failure being not that big of a deal such as how many times Mickey Mantle struck out and to go ahead and fail repeatedly as a path to success, the truth is that failure is to be avoided as it can injure us pretty badly. Success begins with an honest appraisal of our current circumstances. If you are on a dead horse, the first step is to get up and walk away from it, if you have determined the horse is dead. There are many psychological reasons why we have a hard time walking away from a dead “horse” (career, business, relationship, etc.), such as cognitive dissonance, denial, or the sunk cost fallacy. If the “horse” is not dead, but merely injured, and can be repaired, we start the repair and recovery process.