Developing A Get Back Up Mindset

I am sure we have all seen a baby taking their first steps. The most intriguing thing about this experience is how many times they fall and they get back up every time. As we grow older, however, we see falling as something to be ashamed of, because falling means failure. The discrimination of being called a failure haunts and we all make the conscious effort to try and not fail no matter what. However, this is not how life itself was designed to be. At some point, you will fail at something unless you are dead, but as long as you are alive a day will come when you like a little child will miss a step and fall. It does not matter that you have fallen or failed, what matters is how you get back up. Falling is as natural as the rain coming down from the sky, getting up on the other hand takes courage. The beauty is we all possess it, it’s only that we use it. That’s the difference.

You will fail at something and that’s ok.

For you to get up, you have to know that at least once in your life you will fail at something and that is perfectly normal. Failing is a great part of our lives and we will fall. We just have to get back up. There is a quote by Michael B. Jordan that says, “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.” So since failure is a natural phenomenon, there is no reason to dwell on it and throw a pity party and be morbid. Failure is a part of living so get back up. Tell yourself that you can do it, remind yourself of the reasons you started in the first place, always have the end in mind. This will motivate you. You cannot allow failure to keep you bound because the temptation to not try again is high, but you have to remind yourself of the end game and go for it. Tell yourself that you can do it, remind yourself of the reasons you started in the first place, always have the end in mind. This will motivate you. You cannot allow failure to keep you bound because the temptation to not try again is high, but you have to remind yourself of the end game and go for it. Edward Hickson said, “if at first, you do not succeed try, try, and try again.” Give yourself another chance, give it another shot, and see where that leads you. Always choose to get back up after a fall.

Every fall has a lesson in it.

There is a beauty about failing or falling that we often ignore, and that is, there is a lesson to every fall. Let’s go back to the example of the little toddler learning to walk, every time they get up from a fall they walk better, the more they get up the better they walk. This goes to show that whenever something does not go the way we would like or want, it’s not time to throw in the towel, it’s time to get up, dust the dirt off of you and go back to the drawing board. What did you miss? What can you tweak? Where did we make the mistake? All these are gifts of failure. Failure shows you where you missed it and once that is rectified, you can begin again. You can get up. You can get back up from any situation or circumstance provided you decide to pick up something from the fall. Instead of cowering from fear and never trying anything again, you can do it scared. As Les Brown likes to say, “when you get up do not forget to pick up the lesson.” Failure does not exist to cripple you, it exists to harness the gift, the work, the talent of whatever you are working on. It is a gift to ensure you do it right and get it right.

It’s all in the mind

Success or failure is nothing more than a mental construct. We can only claim that we have failed if in our mind we tell ourselves so. Failure to one person can mean success to another, which means we need to have a positive attitude about failure. When we tell ourselves that failure is fatal there is no way we can rise above it. Everything rises and falls on our thought patterns about things. When we view failure as the final nail on the coffin then that is it, we cannot get back up. But, when we think positively about situations and circumstances and think that we can overcome then we can overcome them. “Whether you think you can or you cannot you are right.” Henry Ford. This quote sums up the thrust about humanity all we are and all that we can ever achieve lies in the way that we think. If we think we can get up then we can, if we think we cannot then we will not. At the end of the day, it’s not that we do not have the capacity, it’s that we will not use it. So if failure and success lie in our minds, we can choose to get back up and live to fight for our dreams, our relationships, and our lives another day.

We all have the ability to get back up from any form of failure, we just have to choose to get back up. The gift is that you do not get back up clueless, but armed with knowledge on how to make better decisions that can lead us to success and to winning according to our definition of success. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “the greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”