You’ve probably heard the phrase “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

It’s an excerpt from a line in “To a Mouse,” by Robert Burns.

It means that no matter how well we plan, we can still fail; things can still go wrong, and we can crash and burn!

And it’s true.

No matter how well you plan, success is not a given.

However… it’s how we SEE and USE failure that determines its value.

Yes, I said value.

Failure does have value.

It can have a negative value that robs us of our self-confidence… OR it can have a positive value if we choose to learn from it.

In either case, we have the power to determine the value of our failures.

We just have to be careful about repeating the same experience and then expecting a different outcome.

It isn’t going to happen without making changes.

If you continue to make the same mistakes, the same result (failure) will ALWAYS occur.

This is equally true of scientific experiments and human relationships.

If you make the same mistake, the result WILL be the same.

On the other hand, when failure happens (and failure IS going to happen sooner or later to everybody), if we acknowledge the failure and then set about learning what WE did wrong that caused the failure, failure can guarantee future success.

We search for the cause, and we learn from the failure.

When this happens, failure becomes a stepping stone to success.

Whenever I experience setbacks in life, I remind myself of all the incredibly successful people who failed at first.

For example, Oprah was fired from her first television job as an anchor.

She said she faced sexism and harassment, but she rebounded and became the undisputed queen of television talk shows before amassing her media empire.

Today she’s worth an estimated $2.9 billion, according to Forbes.

Colonel Sanders was fired from dozens of jobs before franchising his successful chicken business at the age of 65

He traveled across the U.S. looking for someone to sell his fried chicken, and after finally getting a business deal in Utah, Kentucky Fried Chicken was born. KFC is now one of the most recognizable franchises in the world.

Vera Wang failed to make the U.S. Olympic figure-skating team. Then she became an editor at Vogue and was passed over for the editor-in-chief position.

She began designing wedding gowns at age 40 and today is one of the premier designers in the fashion industry, with a business worth over $1 billion.

J.K. Rowling was a single mom living off welfare when she began writing the first “Harry Potter” novel.

She’s now internationally renowned for her Harry Potter series and became the first billionaire author in 2004.

At a Harvard commencement speech in 2008, she said, “Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations,” she said. “Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.”

The truth is, you usually have to fail to succeed.

No one emerges at the top.

So don’t look at failure in any part of your life as a “bad” thing.

None of us want to fail, but if we learn from the failure, we’ll be made stronger by it, and the failure can help us to build the success we seek on the ashes of past failures.

If you’re letting your past failures discourage you from taking forward-moving action in achieving the things that are important to you, then I invite you to schedule a free 30-minute consultation with me, so we can discuss the necessary steps to turn things around.

Click here to reserve yours today.