Welcome to today’s post. I’m going to be covering the idea of failure as just being feedback today. Not only that, but I have a great NLP technique to share with you that has improved my life greatly.

I also want to give you a quality exercise that can help you Reframe just about anything in your life.

So with that said, let’s get rocking! 🙂

Failure Is Just Feedback

You don’t fail, you just get feedback.

There’s the classic story about Thomas Edison and his failing lightbulb, but I’m sure you’ve heard that one before. But many other prominent historical figures had failing problems that they overcame in order to make successes of themselves.

Store mogul R.H Macy started and promptly failed seven businesses before he finally succeeded with his world famous store in New York City.

Soichiro Honda, creator of Honda cars, began his business career with a string of failures and was even turned down for a job at the Toyota Motor Corporation before, ultimately, founding the Honda company.

From understanding that failure isn’t the end of the world and is merely feedback as to what we can do to improve our present situation, we can introduce a concrete method of converting that feedback into snippets of more efficient information to help us move forward.

Introducing Reframing

Reframing is another NLP tool and is especially applicable for us here.

To reframe something is to take a concept and flip it on its head – most often spinning a negative context into its positive counterpart.

For instance: A man comes back from a business meeting with potential clients for his video production business.

Unfortunately, he’s just faced a particularly tough rejection. He feels dejected and pathetic and pronounces, “I’m a tool. I’ll never succeed in meetings with those kind of people!”

A useful reframe of this situation would, instead, be: “I’m still cool. I just met someone who didn’t want my services. I’m vetting these people and seeing how cool they are. I just met one who wasn’t cool. It’s better to work it out now than waste my time down the road.”

Here’s another simple reframe:

Negative – “Life is too short, we only have about 20,000 days in our lives.”

   

Reframe – “Life is long. The choices we make now will effect our lives 40 years from now!”

What can you think to reframe in your life right now?

Reframing Your Day Today

Here are some practical methods in which you can reframe your day to day living experiences.

The purpose of this exercise is to get you to understand why you think you “can’t” do something, work out that it’s really a “won’t” and then work out how to make it a “can.”

Further, you might also find a way to change “won’t” into “would” and finally into “will”.

Decide on a day coming up in which you’re going to do this exercise. Your mission for the day is to reframe the word can’t into the word won’t for the entire day.

1. Throughout the day, notice whenever you say or think the word “can’t.”

2. In your mind, change the word “can’t” into the word “won’t.”

For example, if you say something to yourself like, “I can’t talk to her,” change it to “I won’t talk to her.”

Can’t is definite. It makes you feel like it’s not possible to talk to that person. Won’t allows for the question “why wont I?”

3. Now that you’ve reframed can’t into won’t, ask yourself “Why won’t I?”

4. Get to the core of why you won’t.

5. Ask yourself “Well, on the other hand, why would I?”

6. If the reasons why you would want to do something are stronger than the reasons why you won’t, ask yourself one final question:

“Will I do this thing now?” … “YES!”

7. Write about your experiences in your journal. This is important, breakthrough stuff.

An Action Step To Be Getting On With

Now that we understand what Reframing is, and we’ve taken some steps towards reframing really everyday things from our lives, then it’s time to get a little more in-depth.

We have talked about The Five Beliefs before – those are the awesome five beliefs that are key to your business and filmmaking success.

Try this:

1. Write down 5 negative beliefs that you think you currently possess.

2. Now write 5 positive reframes.

3. Tear up the negative ones and roll them up into a ball, then throw them in the trash.

4. The positive ones are your new mantra. Read them twice per day – once in the morning, once before bed.

Get Rid Of That Negative Voice

You know that horrible, negative voice that lingers in the back of your mind telling you the worst things and the  kind of insults that you only dare to repeat to yourself?

   

Let’s eliminate it.

Next time you hear that negative voice telling you that you can’t do something, turn it into a Mickey Mouse voice!

Yes, that’s right: Mickey Mouse. This is a well known NLP technique and it works quickly and powerfully.

Allow the negative voice to come and then turn it into a Mickey Mouse voice.

Instead of a low, abusive voice, it’s now a high pitched cartoon character’s voice.

Abusive now?

No way.

Recapping What We’ve Learned

From understanding that failure isn’t the end of the world and is merely feedback as to what we can do to improve our present situation, we can introduce a concrete method of converting that feedback into snippets of more efficient information to help us move forward.

Move forward.

I hope this helped you with your goals and the way you think about success. Thanks for reading!