Successfully winning the career failure game will not happen overnight; but you can eliminate those self-imposed failures and mistakes that are keeping you from realizing your full potential. Here is a small but very powerful and compelling three point approach to help you win the career failure game.
Acknowledge
Face your guilt, own up to your mistake and don’t make excuses. Resist covering up or hiding it. Accept personal responsibility for your behavior and emotional response. Be open, authentic and stay calm in the face of trouble.
Repair
Attempt to correct the mistake and repair any damage as quickly as possible. Don’t let emotion prevent you from thinking and acting decisively. Say “no” to excessive demands. Know and respect your limitations.
Celebrate
Practice forgiveness—of yourself first; then others. Take time to experience life. Cultivate meaningful leisure time. Focus on the future. Don’t cling to the mistake or dwell on what happened long ago. Watch for new opportunities and “sudden good breaks”.
This 3-point approach forms an “ARC”, which is usually defined as “something shaped like a curve or arch”. I prefer the little known electrical definition, “a highly luminous and intensely hot discharge of electricity” such as found in lightning. According to National Geographic, lightning strikes somewhere on the surface of the earth about 100 times every second, and each flash contains about one billion volts of electricity…enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for three months!
Lightning can help produce a form of nitrogen that’s useful for growing plants, and like a lightning bolt, when we use the “ARC” (Acknowledge, Repair and Celebrate) to win the career failure game, we promote growth and restoration of the human spirit, and our mistakes become learning tools.
Never fear mistakes. Remember, Henry Ford forgot to put a reverse gear in his first automobile, and Thomas Edison once spent $2,000,000 on an invention which proved of little value! You know, experience is a wonderful thing. It helps you to recognize mistakes and failures when they happen again and again. Someone once said that, “The only complete mistake is the mistake from which we learn nothing.” Failure and mistakes will happen, so you don’t have to give them any help!
DOWNLOAD The ARC Approach to remind you of the winning strategies to use when playing the career failure game.
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Wow. I read the three parts of the Career Failure Game…I couldn’t have summed up my own feelings any better than what was written here. I feel like I’m not alone in my career debaucle. I don’t know what my next step is, but I like the ARC strategy. I will pray that God will guide me and help me to use that strategy-and hopefully not make the same mistakes. Thank you for this website, I look forward to reading it each day.
-M.Danielson