It’s #FailureFriday! We’re dedicating the end of the week to reframing our thoughts on failure.

Do you ever feel guilt after you’ve experienced a failure?

Sometimes when we think we’ve done something stupid we feel shame. Marianne Williamson reminds us that once you get through the pain of that, you’ll come out on the other side a more humble person, with a greater perspective after learning the lessons failures have to teach us.

“A failure remains a failure only if we refuse to learn from it. Any situation that teaches us greater humility, sobriety, wisdom about self and others, responsibility, forgiveness, depth of reflection, and better decision-making - teaching us what’s truly important - is not an ultimate failure. Sometimes what we deem a failure at the time it happens actually serves to foster a change within us that creates an even greater success down the road.

Great people are not those who have never fallen down. Great people are those who, when they do fall down, dig deep within themselves and find the strength to get back up.

If you’re like the rest of us, of course you’ve screwed up royally at one point or another. But it doesn’t serve you, or anyone else, for you to beat up on yourself continually. Have appropriate remorse? Yes. Grow from your mistakes and make things right as best you can? Yes. But stay stuck in the mire of self-hatred? Absolutely not.

We may have made mistakes in our past, but we’re not bound by those mistakes in the present - as long as we’re willing to think now as we did not think then, act now as we did not act then, clean up in the present what needs to be cleaned up from the past, and be now who we were not then.”

A great post to refer back to when you’re having a crummy day, no? Things in life will go wrong. Don’t dwell on them, learn from them and move on.