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I’ve always made a total effort, even when the odds seemed entirely against me. I never quit trying; I never felt that I didn’t have a chance to win - Golf Legend Arnold Palmer

Photo by lydiafairy’s photostream

Have you had days when everything seemingly went wrong in your life ?. You are not alone.

You felt life coming to a screeching halt when things did not go the way you anticipated. Your dream job vanished, your relatives are mean to you and despite your best efforts, your relationship is sour. Life can’t get any worst, isn’t it ? Wrong. You are feeling despair, betrayal and slingshot to your ego only because you allow yourself to do so.

Wait a minute ? you said, I am fighting against all odds. I am hapless. No matter how you feel about your current circumstances, good news is that it is simply a condition of your mind. It simply is a self propagated thought of failure that you created in the six inches between your ears. Once you master this axiom, you are on your way to kick the failure in its stomach.

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater
- Albert Einstein

I have had many failures. I’ve always become a better human being by learning from these failures. For instance, when I came to US, I was denied graduate assistant-ship three times due to lack of mastery over American English. I started working for service business to converse with other Americans. I constantly observed everyone who spoke to me and learned the spoken language. Today, I am proud to have an immense control over this once seemingly devastating failure.

I have used these tricks below constantly to cleanse my thoughts of defeats and gloom and redirect my energy and focus on self improvement to excel eventually. I believe that any failure in life can be defeated by using these tricks to condition your mind, to think like a victor.

1. Learn to live in present awareness -

What I mean by this is to learn the art of focusing your awareness to the present moment, not past or future. This trick helps you detach yourself from an outcome that you’ve anticipated. It makes you think “What is wrong with the present moment ?” when things go south. By removing attachment to an outcome, it kills your ego and provides you lenses to dissect the event of failure and find answer to “How can I overcome this ?”. Without learning the art of present moment awareness, we all attach ourselves to an expected outcome in our mind. This trick builds flexible inner attitude to go with the flow and learn from it rather than feeling despair and gloom.

2. Think positively, always -

This is a must to master trick to defeat failure. When I was rejected several times for the scholarship, I constantly infused my positive thoughts to overcome why I was rejected. I knew English well, I had mastered vocabulary. All I needed to do was to start speaking like an average American. I visualized myself speaking to others with confidence and believed that “Yes, I Can” speak like an American if I set my mind to do so. Jokingly, I am now told that I speak like a perfect southerner.

3. Learn from your failures -

Thomas Edison once said “When I failed thousand times to invent bulb, I reminded myself to learn one more way to invent light bulb”. This is profound. How can a man who never went to high school became one of the greatest inventors of our lifetime ? Secret is simply in learning from his failures. He viewed every failure as an experience that led him to eventual discovery that changed the mankind. I tried many times to speak fluent English in my early days in America and failed. I laughed at myself when I had difficulty speaking particular word but then I focused more on the lip movement of others and learned to speak those words that dreaded me most.

4. Never loose sight of your goal -

It’s challenging to stay focused when you face failures in whatever that you are trying to achieve. It tests your will power, it tests your persistence but when you learn to keep laser sharp focus on your goal, nothing can stop you from succeeding. My mother lost her kidney when I was very young. She was told not to perform any physical work for the rest of her life. She was determined to win over the prognosis of these experts and with her will power, her faith and self confidence today she works even at age 70.

Remember the storm is a good opportunity for the pine and the cypress to show their strength and their stability.
-Ho Chi Minh

Other blogs: Steve Pavlina has great article on his blog, Hopeless Situations

To Your Success,