Failure can be our greatest teacher

Have you ever given up on a dream or goal be­cause of your per­ceived fail­ure?

Most of us have. The ques­tion this quote brings up for me is, what if?

What if I’d taken one more step?
What if I went about it a dif­fer­ent way?
What if I tried this, in­stead of that?

I’ve known about my life’s pur­pose and my deep pas­sion to in­spire, mo­ti­vate, and lead peo­ple to live bet­ter lives since I was 22 years old. As I stepped out into liv­ing my pas­sion, I would ex­pe­ri­ence a fail­ure, stop every­thing, and go back to repli­cat­ing the pat­terns I was taught. That “a man gets a job, sup­ports a fam­ily and hope­fully lives long enough to en­joy some re­tire­ment”.

Al­ways the stu­dent, some­time later I’d muster the courage to try again. I would hit an­other per­ceived fail­ure and march right on back to the ex­pec­ta­tions I was taught. It was lit­er­ally painful to have such a mighty pas­sion for some­thing and it feels so far away from pos­si­bil­ity. Maybe you feel like that too?

This went on and on in my life, un­til one day, through a se­ries of events that in­volved plead­ing with God to re­move this pas­sion and place any­thing else in its place, and I would fol­low it with all my heart and soul. Soon af­ter that cool painful Oc­to­ber evening, I came to a place of op­por­tu­nity to start work­ing with a life coach. That started me tak­ing ac­tion af­ter ac­tion re­gard­less of the out­come. It be­came about the progress, not the out­come.

I started uti­liz­ing fail­ure as step­ping stones to show me a bet­ter way. I started falling for­ward.

In every area of my life, I started tak­ing ac­tion and fail­ing for­ward. I did so through mul­ti­ple em­pow­er­ment coach­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, into found­ing IFGT Life Coach­ing, au­thor­ing Life’s Lessons, lead­ing hun­dreds of clients, per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally into ex­pe­ri­enc­ing life-chang­ing trans­for­ma­tion in all ar­eas of their lives. I failed for­ward in re­sign­ing from Cor­po­rate Amer­ica, into mov­ing to the moun­tains of South Car­olina. Into keynote speak­ing and build­ing pow­er­ful pro­grams that lit­er­ally change lives.

My point to all this is to use your fail­ures as teach­ers to show you the path to achieve your great­est, your goals and your dreams. You can­not fail as long as you con­tinue show­ing up! That is the rea­son I named my com­pany, IFGT Life Coach­ing. The IFGT stands for It’s Freak­ing Go Time. Let this be your freak­ing go time in all you un­der­take this month!

Re­mem­ber, Walt Dis­ney was fired from a news­pa­per for lack­ing cre­ativ­ity and not hav­ing any orig­i­nal ideas… Think if he gave up.

What you bring to this world is vi­tal and has the po­ten­tial to have just a huge im­pact. Maybe even larger!