What does success mean to you? The way we interpret success and failure plays a pivotal role in our ability to achieve goals. One person may see a failure while another sees a stepping stone. Let’s consider the importance of these perceptions for accomplishing goals.

Society tends to see success in terms of getting what you want. However, this belief can get in the way of achieving goals because setbacks can be interpreted as failures. It is ultimate success that is important, not short term gratification. For example, if you set a goal of owning your own business, you would be considered successful if you created a profitable business. However, the journey to this success is likely to include some hard times. Don’t make the mistake of viewing difficulties and setbacks as failures.

There are many steps between setting a goal and accomplishing it. Some will be easy while others are difficult. The way we walk through these steps will influence our ability to ultimately succeed.

Failure is often defined as not accomplishing a goal. For example, consider an athlete competing in a 100 meter sprint. The goal is to win first place so those who come in even a close second or third can feel that they have failed. However, they would be mistaken.

Our modern, competitive society conditions us to interpret setbacks and disappointments as failures and only an outright win as a success. This is a very limiting worldview and we need to rethink our values. Every successful person has had to start somewhere and grow in skill, experience and confidence as they move towards their goals. The journey to becoming the winner they want to be involves personal improvement that eventually results in a win.

However, every step towards this ‘win’ needs to be flexible. If one approach doesn’t work the way we want it to, we need to be willing to try another. Sometimes it is even necessary to change the goal itself.

Let’s say you want to learn Italian and set the goal to be speaking reasonable Italian within a year. You may decide to accomplish this goal by taking a course at a local college. Unfortunately, your instructor’s teaching style doesn’t work for you and you find at the end of your first semester that you haven’t learned much at all. This could be seen as a failure, but only if you give up.

You could decide instead to begin learning Italian from a series of training DVDs which use engaging images as well as the voice of a native Italian speaker. They can also be conveniently accessed and used to fast track your learning. At the end of six months, you are now speaking and understanding basic Italian. You have successfully achieved your goal, but your experience of community college looked like a failure. By simply altering your plan to achieve your goal, you became successful.

Be willing to change your view of what constitutes failure when you are setting your goals. Every step of your original plan doesn’t have to work for you achieve ultimate success. If you stay focused, flexible and keep the word ‘failure’ out of your vocabulary, you will find it a lot easier to accomplish your goals..

Andrea Kalli
Certified Internet and Social Marketing VA

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