Handling Failure Well

I once heard an NFL head football coach say that he tells his players to not let one loss turn into multiple losses. 

Losses hurt. Failure hurts. Shame hurts. It hurts when we have certain expectations for ourselves that we don’t meet. Regret haunts us when we have a plan to succeed and then do something to mess it up.

But even when we mess up, it’s important to know that the goals that drove us to before are still good goals. 

Like every sports team, we are going to have losses in our lives. No one is immune to that. 

Some of our losses are going to be crippling and cause our goals to be more difficult to reach. But it's important to remember that just because our goals are more difficult, they may not be unattainable. 

Every good movie or book has a moment of apparent defeat when it seems like things aren’t going to work out. We have to fight our way out of these moments of defeat so we don’t get stuck in them.

No good movie ends in the moment when all hope seems lost. 

In the same way, you shouldn’t accept the idea that because you’re in prison, your life is ruined. That’s not an idea that God agrees with. Scripture contains numerous examples of people who left prison and lived a happy life afterward.

One of the most important skills we can learn is to not allow one failure in life to lead to multiple failures.