Distance.
When I was a kid a good long while back, my grandparents gave me those funny dog magnents that repelled each other. Failure and momentum repel one another. You cant get momentum anywhere near failure.
So momentum's not enough. You need to build distance from your failure. And you're gonna fail. You have to. Learning something wrong very often lets you see how it's done right.
But if you're not careful, you'll kill off any momentum you need to succeed. this is the second part of that secret sauce. You gotta do it; you have to fail, you must succeed; you need momentum. A chicken-or-the-egg kind of paradox.
distance emotionally.
Medical hypnosis can train a patient to undergo surgery without anesthesia. Using your mind; your imagination; to reframe your past, to describe your future and your abilities in a way that allows you to succeed--to see you have succeeded. Time too can help in granting this distance. To shake off the idea you can't change or that change isn't happening already. You can't stop change. Time and distance gives you that.
distance physically.
When you're getting angry, taking a time out and getting away from the offending person or situation is a good idea. The same is true with failure. Being somewhere else--where you have succeeded can give distance to it. Taking a walk, a bike ride, or an evening out is a way to distance yourself from a project where you're spinning your wheels and getting nowhere.
distance mentally.
Focus allows you to block out your failure in that same moment. yes, you've failed. But you can't fail and succeed at the same time in the same moment. You must experience them one at a time. One after the other. You may be failing repeatedly, but it's one moment after the other, and success can be in that moment when failure isn't.
It's the "aha!" when it works--when you get that tiny screw back into the brand new Warby Parker frames you just sat on or hook that trout on the twentieth presentation of the dry fly you tied on the stream bank that morning.
Focus drives out the preceding moment allowing you to be in this moment which is new and open to change.
Where are you finding your hand holds when distancing from failure?
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