#54 Reflections on Failure: How to Fuel Growth from Setbacks

What happens is, when we don't get up and fail expectations, we become bitter people who hate to see others people succeed. When things don't go the way you want them to go, what happens to you?

See, but the real challenge, the real challenge of growth mentally, emotionally and spiritually comes when you get knocked down. Somebody said that adversity introduces a man to himself or woman. How you handle it, that's where the growth takes place.

Hey y'all, this is Lionel. Hey, I want to talk about how to get up from failed expectations. It's not the fact that we get knocked down, it's how do we get up and move forward, face our fears to discover a new tomorrow.

Let's talk about it Brought you to this point. What did you learn from it? Are you learning anything? Are you doing it over and, over and over again?

Well, people have a tendency to become bitter. They become paralyzed and don't know how to get up from those failed expectations. And when you become bitter and paralyzed and you can't get up from those failed expectations, there's several things that happen. One of the first things that happen is that you become resentful. You become paralyzed, you don't know how to move forward. Becoming a resentful person means that you just live a life full of regret, and living a life full of regret means that you don't know how to move forward. You develop low self-esteem because of it. Ok, the other thing is, when you don't know how to get up from what you've gone through, you're not able to use it to prepare you for your next venture or your next experience. So you become paralyzed because of divorce, or because of the business that work out, or because of a relationship with someone that's not good.

That's called life.

Or any of these things, right. You begin to hate yourself, you begin to have low self-esteem, you begin to give up on your dreams and passions and desires. You do that because you're paralyzed, you don't know how to move forward, and you're now being captured by low self-esteem.

So what can you do, what can we do in order to move forward?

Well, number one we have to die to expectations. So in order for Jesus to be a person that we love, we have to be able to move forward, and we have to be able to move forward. Jesus to accomplish his goal, he had to die. That's an example of a metaphor for how you and I have to go through a certain kind of death internally in order for us to transition from one phase of life to the next. So you have to die to yourself. You have to die to pass expectations and failed realities. So that's the first thing. So that relationship is not going to work. That business didn't work. That friend portrayed you. You just have to let it go. Die to it. Number two you have to have self-reflection. Self-reflection is a big thing because what self-reflection does? It allows you to use the resources from past failures as fuel to push you forward. The scripture verse in the Bible says unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it can't produce fruit. In other words, unless you, if you don't use self-reflection as a way to teach you about yourself and how to move forward, for instance, if you failed because of things that work out the way you wanted to go, what did you learn from that experience? How can those experiences be the soil to teach you about yourself? If you're dealing with low self-esteem because you're a spouse Betrayed you or your friend boyfriend, a girlfriend betrayed you, right? How does it teach you? How does it feel you to go forward? What are you learning? That's why I have these journals right here, because journals is all about self-reflection, because it teaches you something about yourself. So you have to let the past be the past. That expectations. Number two, you have to dive into self-reflection and Look at how those experiences have given you life lessons that you can use to move forward. And what's more important, and all of that is, once you get, get beyond the past, once you start self-reflecting, then you begin. You can begin creating a new you, setting new expectations, but now you have all your past experiences behind you that will fuel you to go forward how to take failure and use it as an opportunity To move forward. John Max we are wrote a book called falling forward. I encourage you to check that out. Okay, and so this is my vision, my hope, my message to you that you don't have to Stay stuck or, like I would say, you don't have to stay stuck on stupid because of what didn't work out in the past, and I know that because I wouldn't do that myself. But you can start Again, so I want you to start again, okay, peace.

You.