35: The 4-Step Mind Map for Negotiating Setback and Failure
Reaching a certain age can conjure dark thoughts of failure: the job you worked for years to get but got passed over for...the former spouse who was wrong for you...the family you didn’t get to start. So you look for new directions...and the answer to achieving your goals, or giving them up, feels obvious: you simply make new ones.
But taking up new projects obscures the problem. When you aim at a future goal, your satisfaction is deferred because your success has yet to come. The moment you succeed, your achievement is in the past. Meanwhile, your engagement with the project subverts itself: you either fail at pursuing a goal or, in succeeding, you end its power to guide your life.
The problem isn’t that you’ll run out of projects--surely, you can create new ones--it’s that your way of engaging with the ones that matter most to you is by trying to avoid failure. And when you reach your goal, you exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.
When you’re obsessed with replacing old goals with new ones as you work to achieve more or work to avoid failure, your satisfaction is always in the future. Or the past. It’s mortgaged, then archived, but never possessed. In pursuing goals, when you aim at outcomes, you might preclude the possibility or value of the pursuit, extinguishing the sparks of meaning in your life.
No wonder you may be experiencing a midlife malaise...haunted by the hollowness of everyday life. At the root of this is a discomfort with how to handle setbacks and failure.
Naturally, you’re wondering what to do about this.
Which is why we’re learning a 4-Step Mind Map for negotiating setbacks and failure--or managing our missteps--so we can unhook from these experiences and create space for generating new meaning and satisfaction.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE
4 steps to negotiate setbacks and failure to greater effect
How to turn negative viewpoints of setbacks into positive ones
The risks of lacking belief in yourself
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Click here to see the transcript!
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