Failure is the Stepping Stone to Success

Remember the time when your tiny toddler came running towards you, stumbled, and fell headlong. This is an experience common to all parents. No child has learned to walk and run without falling. The difference is how you, the parent, reacted to it. You can teach your child to face failure from that age. All you need to do is to encourage them to get up, dust off and resume the activity. If you fuss around them and make a big deal out of it, you have already set a wrong trend. They will howl and scream and seek your attention, forgetting the activity altogether.

Therefore it is important to focus on the goal. Tell your children that there will be many hurdles to cross, and not all of them will be easy. But if they treat every hurdle as a challenge that will prepare them for a better tomorrow, they will not only cross it but will look forward to taking up more challenges. Challenges are the spice of life; they help you realize your potential, which may have remained inactive if you had not dared to do something which looked impossible at that time. Inspire your children to take up new challenges. And, even if they fail, help them see how much they have gained from the experience.

Einstein once said that 'those who haven't failed haven't tried anything new.' Tell your children that it is far better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all. Talk with your children about your failures and how you responded to them. Tell them how many times you failed, and how many times you started all over again with renewed vigor and determination. Share with them the pain you felt and the lessons you learned from them.

Positive attitude is the key to success. A negative person can turn even success into failure. The difference between an optimist and a pessimist is in how they perceive situations in life. The optimist who thinks positively looks at difficulties as opportunities while a pessimist looks at opportunities as difficulties. Help your child see the difference in everyday activities. The best example is the half-full or half-empty glass of water. If you see tendencies of negative thinking in your child, turn them around as early as possible otherwise it will be more difficult to root them out once they set in.

Finally, never let your child dwell on their failures. Encourage them to try again. Talk to your children about uplifting stories on failure and success and inspire them to treat each failure as a stepping stone to success. Persistence is the mantra for success. Tell your child to keep trying till they succeed. Thomas Edison had conducted more than ten thousand experiments; all the members of his team had given up, but he stayed enthusiastic about trying new ways. When someone asked him why he had not lost hope after close to 10,000 unsuccessful experiments, he explained the elimination process and said that it was because of these failures he was 10,000 steps closer to success. So, how could he give up when he could see that he was almost there?