By Leo Rodriguez Jr.

My wife and I had been married for about four years when I realized I had failed her on most of the promises I had made to her. It happened suddenly while I was at work. I started thinking of how little progress I had made towards everything we wanted early in our marriage, and trust me, we didn’t want much and somehow I had still managed to fall short.

As I thought of everything I would do differently if I could do it again, my heart rate went up, my breathing got heavy and my mind blurry. I could almost see a living image of me standing with my wife looking at our dreams fade away in the distance. Let me tell you, that was not romantic at all.

You guessed right if you think I felt like a failure, like a loser.
This beautiful girl had trusted me to take care of her. She gave birth to our first child. She quit her job to be with our son 24-7. She supported me on whatever venture I got into. She always did her best for us and in return I had a list of broken promises. Not a fair deal by any standards.

This whole thing lasted no more than a minute but it felt like a long time for sure. It seems like when you dwell on negativity time seems to move a lot slower. Right in the middle of me feeling like crap a thought came to mind “you need to live with lessons, not with regrets. ” Boom!

Immediately after this came to mind, my breathing relaxed and my mind cleared. Suddenly my mind was filled with lessons I could learn from every mistake I had made. I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down as many lessons as I could think of from every aspect of my life. In less than 2 minutes I had gone from the most overwhelming feeling I had ever felt, to ideas filled with endless potential.

Let me share with you 4 lessons I learned:

• Own failure. Failure is what happens, not who you are. Failure is only a short scene in the long movie of your life. Failure is a word used to describe things not going your way. You can argue that in spite of not reaching your goal you are a better person for having tried, and I agree. yet, you failed. It may sound harsh but if you can’t admit that fact, you won’t be able to learn or benefit from your past failures. You must turn failure into positive. Henry Ford said “Failure is merely an opportunity to more intelligently begin again.” This world we live in puts so much weight on the word failure that we are scared, terrified to get close to it. Own failure by realizing its merely a step on the stairway to success. Admit it and own it!
• Take responsibility for your failures. After you admit your failures and mistakes you might be tempted to blame others or blame your circumstances for such failures. Doing this will weaken your ability to learn a lesson and improve. I mean, how can you change something you can’t control? you can’t. Look for the things that are 100% under your control and take full responsibility on those. Learning to take responsibility will empower you to make significant changes and move forward. Taking responsibility will lead to action and only doing will you ever achieve anything.
• Write down your lessons. Get a piece of paper and write down the areas of your life where you feel you have failed on your goals. Some of those areas may include: Family-Health-Professional-Spiritual-Financial-Self Development. 
For each section you choose, write down a lesson you can learn from it and explain in writing, to yourself, how understanding this specific lesson will help you avoid the same mistakes and how it will help you  move forward. Call me crazy but there is something about writing stuff down that helps the learning process.
• Don’t be too hard on yourself. Because you failed on something that doesn’t mean that you are a failure. All of us have failed and made mistakes. All of us will continue to fail on some things because that is life. We are humans. What matters is how we react to our failures. Don’t allow past failures to limit the potential of your future success.
  The way we look at and deal with our failures will have a huge impact on our character and potential to grow.

What have you learned from failure?
Leave a comment sharing your experience.