FALLing Forward: A Process For Progress After Failure

Today, +Terry Doloughty stopped by. It was a followup to an earlier visit in which he and some other friends helped me to unload a chiffarobe that I had brought up from Louisville.

The chiffarobe had belonged to my Dad, and after he passed, I told Mom that it was the only thing of his that I wanted. Mom passed in May, and I went down to pick up the chiffarobe in November.

Loading, transporting, and unloading it turned into much more of an adventure than I anticipated or would have dared imagine, partly because it was missing a wheel and when you tried to move it across the floor, it tilted, and pieces that were held together by tongue and groove worked themselves loose and ultimately my friends and I wound up disassembling and reassembling the thing in my office.

After that, I ordered a pair of wheels online. Tonight Terry installed them. The chiffarobe now sits even - as much as it can on a sloping floor.

None of this has anything to do with what this blog post is about, except that the idea for it popped into my head while Terry and I were working with the chiffarobe.

The idea was a two-word phrase: "fall forward." Or rather, "FALL Forward."

You ever have stuff come to your mind so quickly and completely that you don't even feel like you *thought* of it - that it feels like it just arrived?

"FALL forward" did that. Suddenly I saw an acronym for breaking free of a persistent pattern in my life.

The imprisoning pattern is -

1. I mess up in some way: I miss a deadline, I fail to keep a promise. I do or say something that I should not have done or said.  Something.
2. I procrastinate on doing what I could do to fix the situation, partly because I am too busy with #3...
3. I feel bad about the failure. Like, I work at feeling bad about it. I avoid the other person(s) involved, feeling certain that they now hate me. This persists indefinitely until...
4. I reconnect with the other person(s) involved, apologize, and if there is still something to be done, go ahead and do it (those items are not necessarily in that order).

When the phrase "FALL Forward" popped into my head this evening, this was the acronym that it contained for breaking free of that pattern:

1. Forgive yourself. Making this the first step in the process makes it easier to do #2, and thus prevents the endless cycling of #3 above.
2. Ask forgiveness of the other person(s) involved. You don't have to tell the entire story and history of what lay behind the failure/mistake/sin. Just acknowledge it, apologize and do what you can (if anything) to repair the damage.
3. Learn from the experience - intentionally and deliberately. Set aside time, sit down with pen and paper, or keyboard and screen, ask yourself, "What can I learn from this?" and don't stop writing until you feel like you've exhausted the lessons from the experience.
4. Let it go. Really. We all make mistakes or commit sins of varying degrees of severity. Once you've done #s 1-3, rehashing stuff doesn't create additional value for anyone. Let it go. Move forward.

FALL forward.

That's it. I told Terry that I thought it could make a nice short talk, or a booklet, or even a 200-page book for the self-improvement section of the bookstore. All it needs is lots of quotes and anecdotes.

What do you think?

Memo to myself, 20130530

Success requires the persistent pursuit of a consistent intention. Circumstances change. When they do, the intention must remain consistent - and the pursuit of it, persistent.

Persist. Persist.

Persisting in a consistent intention in changing circumstances will require changing behaviors - i.e., adapting.

DO THIS: Create a list of changes you need to make in order to act more effectively in your life environment. Develop the will to adapt, and let the intention to adapt as necessary undergird your other intentions: I will change what I must within myself to bring these intentions to pass.

More simply: I will change myself as needed to make these things happen.

The better you get at adapting while maintaining consistent intentions, the more inevitable your success.

Also: the better you get at adapting while maintaining consistent intentions, the more likely it is that when success (inevitably) comes, someone will accuse you of manipulating circumstances - someone who has no idea how often, to what degree, or at what cost you have adapted to circumstances.

Let them. There's no preventing a loser from saying that a winner has cheated. 

Success tip #47a - make like a broken record.

It just occurred to me that one reason I have not achieved more is because I get tired of my own voice, especially when it's saying the same thing over and over.

As a result of being tired of hearing myself say the same thing over and over, I sometimes stop saying that thing. That weakens me because sometimes achievement depends on saying the same thing over and over. The power of persistence and of consistency largely lies in saying the same thing over and over.

What brought all of this to mind was reading about the primary election that wrapped up a few hours ago, in which Bill Peduto won the Democratic nomination for mayor. In Facebook comments, Homewood Children's Village president and CEO Derrick Lopez noted that the voter turnout was an abysmal 22 %.

That made me think that perhaps I should have used Homewood Nation to urge people to vote in this election. And if I ask myself why I didn't, the immediate answer is, "Because I've said that before, to the point that I got tired of hearing myself say it.. So I stopped."

But people still need to vote. And if I had kept saying that, then maybe by now I would have sparked some action, some collaboration, something that would get more people voting.

There was a period, a few years ago, when I said with some regularity to whomever would listen long enough to let me, "Buy a house in Homewood while you can still afford it." I got tired of hearing myself say it, and I stopped.

There are still people who would benefit from buying a house in Homewood.

Those examples highlight ways in which my persistence in saying the same things over and over might benefit others. But that persistence could also benefit me, directly, by helping me to do things I need to do, when I am not inclined to do them. Or even before that, by simply reminding myself of what I trying to accomplish during my remaining time on Earth.

Lord, let me love the sound of my own voice speaking truth. Let me never tire of hearing myself speak truth.