Would you take advice from a failure? I’m going to guess that some of you responded with a resounding NO! People with low self esteem, and it seems from my practice, particularly women with low self esteem hate it when they fail or make a mistake. This is even more true for women in business.

My intention is that you will dramatically change your perception of "failure" by the end of our short time together here. This isn’t just one of those women issues, as anyone can suffer from this perception, but this bit of information is for women to help women.

When a person is in low self esteem, making a mistake only amplifies an existing sense of blame and disapproval. To them, a mistake is only proof that they are "less than". They may even be in denial of what really happened and may feel they have something to hide, even from themselves. These people can be very self defensive or destructive to themselves or even destructive and harmful to others.

To compound that loss, they also don’t avail themselves of a fantastic and timely leaning opportunity; they get no useful and positive feedback and not much chance of making a change for the better. In fact, they are probably condemned to repeat the same past mistakes, right?

Why? It’s human nature for someone still struggling with emotional mastery and self esteem issues to ruminate on or even gloss over a failure. Besides getting stuck in feeling badly, they are missing so much good feedback because they don’t assess what went wrong with the intentions of learning so that they can do better next time!

In my other life before coaching and training, we would hold postmortem meetings after an IT change. It means the same as an autopsy - - a thoughtful analysis at the end of the project to access what happened. Invaluable information! Provided by the experts - - the people on the scene. What value could you take from the IT experts process?

Learning from your failures can and should be as informational and productive as learning from your successes. But only with this caveat: You need to examine your failures from the very same success mindset of thinking and behavior that gave you your successes!

So I coach my clients to do an assessment of their "failures" on a daily basis. This is much easier when you have a solid foundation of self worth and self esteem. From a foundation of self worth as a birthright, you can accept that making a mistake, or failing at something, is only human nature. We aren’t perfect and we will fail and we will make mistakes. In this light, failure only becomes feedback.

Having a strong and solid inner sense of self worth means that a failure or a mistake doesn’t define who you are. When you believe that you are still a good person, it’s simply feedback that you need to try something else to get the outcome that you want. You will stop equating your self worth and self esteem with making mistakes or not making mistakes.

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