“Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.” —Marylyn von Savant

Failure is such a harsh word. “You’re a failure,” the woman shouts at her husband who just lost his job. “I’m a failure,” says the woman who just lost a relationship. “You failed your exam?” a mother says incredulously to her high school daughter. The stigma of failure is profound. We absorb the message into our being, and presume that’s what we are. A failure.

Battles can be lost, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t also win the war. We measure our failures by what they represent to us. It is a function of time and perspective that determines how we see the events of our lives. I failed miserably as a mother to my first two children, and I could have stayed there with that thought, but I took a decision to try again, and this time I succeeded. I became a good-enough mother to not just the children I brought into the world later, but to ALL my children because I was willing to take another look at these failures to see where I could correct them. And I did. I love all my kids and they are all thriving in life. They understood that my failure in the beginning was simply a result of not having enough information. I didn’t know how to be a healthy mother because I never had any lessons in what that looked like.

When we understand the principle that failures are regularly caused by not having enough information, we can then move on. If you are missing parts of the story, then you can;t possibly make the right decision, the right choice, or take the right direction. There is always more we can learn. It is never the end of the story, unless you choose that position. The power inherent in failures is the lessons we learn to make ourselves stronger, more experienced, more alive. That’s the true power of failure.

Success is when we learn how to fail forward. We learn that no matter what comes at us, there is always some other way to look at it. When I lost my house during a particularly challenging part of my life, I was mad as hell. But if I hadn’t lost the house, I would not have gone on to live in Europe with my kids for nine years and gave them all kinds of experiences they would never have had. There is always another way to look at things. You get to choose whether it’s a failure or just another choice to be made.