Where you focus your attention determines your emotional state. When you fixate on the problems that you’re facing, you create and prolong negative emotions which hinder your ability to reach your goals. When you focus on the actions you'll take to better yourself and your circumstances, you create a sense of personal efficacy that produces positive emotions and improves performance.
Failure can erode your self-confidence and make it hard to believe you’ll achieve a better outcome in the future. Most of the time, failure results from taking risks and trying to achieve something that isn’t easy. Success lies in your ability to rise in the face of failure, and you can’t do this when you’re living in the past. Anything worth achieving is going to require you to take some risks, and you can’t allow failure to stop you from believing in your ability to succeed. When you live in the past, that is exactly what happens, and your past becomes your present, preventing you from moving forward.
-- Travis Bradberry
It is easy to presume that such things apply to other people (not me). I'm asking myself today where I have let a sense of failure over something in the past prevent me from choosing something again now. Are there things I want that I am avoiding now, simply because it didn't turn out exactly as I had hoped it would? What if I just need to try again? What if I can learn something of value each time I simply try again? What do I really have to lose anyway?
