A focus on accomplishing your goals and fulfilling your dreams is essential to success. We all know that; but that focus is difficult for many of us to maintain. There are often voices in our memories or in our lives telling us we cannot succeed, calling us failures, or undermining our self confidence in other ways.

Here are the first three key steps to moving beyond the paralysis of memory and demoralizing messages:

1. Remember that everyone has experienced failure at some time in her or his life. Failure feels bad at the time, but it can be a very positive experience for the rest of your life. If you are constantly reviewing your failures, stop and think about what you learned from each failure and how it made you a better person.

2. Once you have extracted the positive from each failure forget it. Whether you can simply tell your mind to stop reminding you or you need to do something like writing down each failure on a small piece of paper, putting it in a box, and burying it or taking it to the dump, get rid of it.

3. If someone in your life is constantly throwing your failures in your face, have a talk with that person. Explain that this behavior is hurtful and that you will not tolerate it in the future. If necessary, create a penalty system you use every time that person brings up a past failure. This will help the person recognize and correct the behavior.

Please check back next week for the next steps. Share how you handle defeating thoughts here.

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
– Marcus Aurelius

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