Pathways Counselling

Article

Article

“Failure can be your friend”

Failure can be your friend
One of the biggest challenges in anybody’s life is to know how to interpret failures. How we deal with adversity and challenges will shape our lives probably more than anything else. John Keats said, ‘failure is in a sense the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true’.

 

However, insight comes when – and only when – we are prepared to accept it. Crises force us to pay attention to the disorder of our thinking. They can save us even as we teeter on the brink of a still greater disaster – if we are listening. If we think of difficulties as signposts waiting to be read, we can ask ourselves questions such as, ‘what is the problem I am experiencing telling me about myself, about my thoughts, my beliefs, my actions, my choices, my lifestyle?’ As we all know, these are often reflected in the work history we have pursued and the work environment we now find ourselves in.

It can be helpful here to think of two kinds of selves within us – oursafekeeping self and ourexperimental self. Basically, our safekeeping self corresponds to our left brain, and our right brain is the seat of our experimental self. It is the work of careers counselling to explore the impact of both these ‘selves’ on us as individuals. Careers counselling differs considerably from careers guidance in that it gives strategies to disarm the overreactive, overprotective, and often dull and boring ‘go-nowheresafekeeping self. It helps restore the proper balance between it and the experimental self – the self that doesn’t mind being wrong, but excitedly uses negative situations to make connections to new and positive opportunities. There are so many ways of doing this that are quite simple – for example the use of classical music unlocks ourexperimental self painlessly and effectively. Careers counselling offers suggestions like this to enable you to go away and do your own exploring with a ‘winners’ mindset.

What opportunities are waiting for you right now in your life? You will never know until you look for them. Very seldom do opportunities stand up and wave a flag at you. They are more likely to come disguised as problems and failures. If you are willing to open up and explore your ‘problems’ with this new attitude, some exciting surprises will await you. Your struggles and stresses are actually challenges and opportunities. Someone very wise once said, ‘the only mistakes we ever make are the ones we don’t learn from’.

Exploring these concepts from the perspective of your job, what is right with it, what is wrong with it and where it is leading you to, is the new specialty of Pathways Counselling. Feel free to call and explore this with me on 07-3781828.

Karen Buckland

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