Failure is in the air and you can emerge stronger than ever.

Failure is the great American Taboo and today it is bubbling to the surface all around us. Very few people are escaping job lay offs, job off shoring, job pay cuts, investments shrinking, home value declining, the neighborhood crumbling, relationships going awry etc. Someday we may look back on this period of global recession as a moment in time when a convergence of big scares rattled peoples beliefs about the basics of their existence and what their purpose is. It is no longer possible to avoid failure just by being conscientious and working hard. This formula of working hard is the formula of our parents and our grandparents which they took to the bank and it had its moment in time in which has by now run its course.

Since the world has changed in a way that makes failure inedible what's the solution? LEARN to failure BETTER! Change your personal philosophy in the way you look at failure. Your personal income as well as your happiness is directly related to your personal philosophy. Always has been and always will be.

Learning is error driven because the brain is naturally trying to be more efficient. When you error the brain wants to learn from the experience and adapt. The adaptation is where learning takes place so you get BETTER and function more efficiently. We make predictions all the time in so many different things going on that we expect to have happen and when a mistake happens or an error in judgment, those mistakes register disproportionately. This forces us to integrate that new information. Oddly enough, not so odd if you understand the purpose of a challenge, the more wildly wrong our prediction the quicker we learn. Our brain feeds on failure and learning is error driven. From a logical stand point, failure is nothing more than feedback. It’s the negative feedback you get that the brain is so acutely aware of. Being so acutely aware of this negative feedback innately drives the will of our brain to want to learn and learning is the only means for opportunity to pull yourself out of failure and emerge stronger than ever before. You must understand the PURPOSE in the challenge and in failing. Without it we cannot learn, grow, become, succeed, fulfill etc.

"I have failed over and over again and that is why I succeed" - Michael Jordan, Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, Oprah, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Wright brothers.

At its worst failure is a mixed blessing that can hurt but provides opportunities to learn and grow. Setbacks, adversity, even trauma may be necessary to come out happy, successful and fulfilled. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia refers to "Post traumatic growth. Wildly successful people credit their accomplishments to earlier failures that pushed them to the edge of the abyss.”

For some people failure has stripped away everything that is inessential. For those with the right personal philosophies this will teach them things about themselves they could not have learned other wise and come out of it stronger than ever, maybe even become wildly successful. For others with the wrong personal philosophies they will simply allow it to consume them and never get out of their situation. You must learn that trauma is survivable so that you don't plunge too deeply, exacerbate an already bad situation by your own doings, and never recover from it.

Learn to compartmentalize your emotions. Perform in your life but without becoming emotionally attached to your loses. Remember, logically, failure is nothing more than feedback so you may adapt and become better. FAILURE SHOWS US THE PATH TO GETTING BETTER! Don't you want to get better? Learn to fail better. Emotionally attaching yourself to your losses has a tendency to exacerbate the situation by your own doings and could even prevent you from harnessing the opportunity to get better that only failure can give you. Don't blow those opportunities because you're emotionally attached to your loses.

Everyone experiences failure and even at least mild depression from it at times. The same set of circumstances that drives one person into the ground makes another person stronger. Why is that? Why do some people pull themselves out and others do not? I like Susan Nolen Hooeksemas take on this, a psychologist at Yale. She states that "Some people slip into rumination. Rumination is a spiral of morbid self involvement that's extremely difficult to shake." If you have enthusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks and failures you can find the kernel of good inside the bad, use that kernel to your advantage, and profit from it.

Life is mix of successes and failures. The wildly successful and happy people in our world have just learned to fail better, that's all. Usually a person at the beginning through the early thirties looses, a lot. The people who are going to succeed are the ones who learn to stand it and discipline their disappointments. Sadly most people are so devastated by their loses and setbacks that they never adapt, never learn to metabolize that failure and consequently never get ahead. The ones that do get ahead will lose and put their loses behind them emotionally.

Do you have a hard time processing failure in your brain so that you can move on? If so then it's not the world that is keeping you back, it's you that’s keeping you back and it's just something you've got to work on by means of self development. Try this out, write down your feelings in a journal and put a date over every entry. This will force you to come to terms with what happened and process that information. It also serves to improve your social skills, making you more likeable, helps you become less vindictive and makes it easier to move on and pull yourself out of that less than desirable place you are in.

Don't flinch from failure. Learn to be resilient. Don't put up the walls that block out failure. Welcome all experiences good and bad. Let the bad ones teach you. Welcome failures as learning opportunities to teach you how to become wildly successful. If you don't believe you can learn anything from your mistakes then you won't welcome failure with open arms. If you don't welcome failure you're more vulnerable to a downward "spiral of morbid self involvement" instead of an upward soaring of wild success.

A HUGE mistake you could make that is extremely difficult to recover from is putting up those walls shielding yourself from failures and setbacks. Without that trial and error learning you place yourself at great risk to anxiety disorders for when failure does eventually happen, and it will happen eventually. This doesn’t mean you should jump head first into the deep end of the pool if you don’t know how to swim. Gradually expose yourself so your brain has time to adapt and ultimately succeed.

The great pay off in failing is that it gives us another chance, but to act with more intelligence next time around. There is a strong sense of pride that can be felt in the potential positive consequences of failing IF you understand the PURPOSE and OPPORTUNITY within the failures.

In the end, with the right personal philosophies, there is no such thing as failure if you learn something and grow from the experience. Failure should be an implicit part of your success. Trial and error becomes trial and SUCCESS.

Tom Birkenmeyer - Independent Beachbody Coach