How do you deal with criticism or failure in your life?

Does it make you downtrodden?  Sad?  Or do you get angry or upset?   Does this feeling Last?  Or do you just slough it off and move on?

These are important considerations – how you handle both criticism and failure.  In fact, this single factor is the basis of your success. Your ability to rebound from certain failure – not the failure itself – determines whether or not you are a winner.

That doesn’t mean you have to fail constantly to be successful, no.  But failure is inherent in success . . . just as stumbling is inherent in learning to walk.  Everybody does it; everybody fails.  And it’s said that the only barrier to success is giving up.

I looked at this for years and years, because I failed more times than I’ve succeeded; in fact many more times.  In the beginning of these failures I was totally crushed.  Defeated.  I had this feeling inside like somebody punched me in the stomach; did it to me personally. Each failure became like a personal cross I had to bear . . . and it hurt.  I mean, failure absolutely hurts in the beginning.

While I knew most of the problem was inside me, that knowledge didn’t help.  There was something there, inside myself; inside my gut that just did not allow me to move forward.

Affirmations, success training, writing down and repeating goals, and rah-rah seminars and other motivational training only served to add to my despair once the smoke had cleared and reality set in.

I discovered there is a distinct difference between those who operate under what I call the “seed of failure” (SOF) and those who operate under a different set of rules entirely . . . governed by what I call the “seed of success” (SOS).  Based on the Law of Attraction, there is a pattern of either failure or success that is born and set in motion, depending on which seed you own.

Based on the fact that my life mostly sucked, I was aware I probably operated out of the first seed  (SOF).  It took me most of my life, however,  to discover exactly what my own seed of failure was and how to root it out.

The reason was that this seed – like that which sprouts and grows into a kudzu plant in the southern United States – was extremely powerful and resistant (Riddle:  How do you grow Kudzu?  Answer: Throw the seeds on the ground, fertilize them with concrete blocks, and run like heck before it grows all over you!).  All the affirmations and goal-setting in the world was not going to dislodge this sucker!

We are born with both seeds of failure and success. One, however, is dominant.  Maybe it became dominant in the first few years of our life. Maybe it became dominant through ancestral tendencies.  I don’t know.  What I do know, however, is that most people are either born with, or develop at an early age, the tendency to fail.  The innate strong drive for success is a rare gift.

By the way, the “seed of failure” (SOF) is NOT the same failure spoke of by those I call “The Great Ones” – those I consider to be the masters of Achievement – high-income earners and producers.  Most of their failures – though many – had to do with circumstances, or outside obstacles and barriers.  They still had their emotional/mental Seed of Success (SOS) firmly planted, even if it started out small, or wasn’t apparent to others.

Different success and motivation gurus report their own unique trials and tribulations, i.e., arriving in the US “with a buck-fifty in my pocket;” “sleeping in my apartment bathtub;” “selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door” and other delightful memories.  These, however, only strengthened their resolve (or SOS) to achieve unbelievable success in later life.  One with the Seed of Success,  in fact, uses all these failure stories to actually lay the foundation for his or her later success.

In the beginning of my search for success I even took a page from their book.  I started documenting all my humble circumstances in hopes this exercise would spur me to greater success as well.  It didn’t.  After a decade of writing all this stuff down, nothing changed.  I finally decided to ditch the whole thing after the stack of sob stories got too depressing to look at!

It took some very subtle stealth tactics and quite a bit of grace (and maybe a touch of luck) to be able to access my own SOF and render it impotent.  I’m sharing this with you in hopes that you won’t have to repeat what I went through, along with countless others.

If you’re young, that’s great.  You can take this information now and use it to expand your SOS exponentially.  If you’re older, you will have a deeper appreciation of the fact that anything that allows the subconscious to go from failure to success is, indeed, a remarkable process!!

Next: Failure Has a Very Good Reason