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?

When Days Seem Swift, And Work Seems Slow, And Sleep Is To Be Feared

"Insomnia" - Alex Grey - AlexGrey.com

Exploring the capabilities of Google Hangouts is a perfectly fine thing to do, but 5:30 am after a sleepless night is not the time to do it!

Nor is this the time to post an item on my blog, nor do any of the other things that I want to do right now rather than sleep!

Fear, fear, fear! 

Must work more....must do more...must create value....must get better...must make money...must work more...must do more...must explore more....must find the key, the trigger, the leverage point....must change...must transform...must work more...must do....a little more...must do....one...more...thing....just this...must do this...then a little sleep....as little as possible....because there's so much to do...always...so many promises...so much to say...so many stories to tell...thoughts to share...ideas to manifest....so much to do, always...in all ways....at all times....all the time...

God, I want eternity. I want it now. I want to have forever to work - to dream, then plan, then build and make and do...

Forgive me, God, for I hate time. I hate the finitude of it, the always-running-out of it, the relentless, unceasing disappearance of it.

And yet You placed me in this ....this box, this set of contraints....

Worse, You placed Yourself within it.

What were You thinking?

To demonstrate what eternity expressed in time looks like?

Master, the tempest is raging. How can You sleep?

Because Father neither slumbers nor sleeps.

And now, neither do You. Unresting, unhasting.

And because You do not sleep, I can. It's okay to. It's okay to do only a day's work within any day.

But I feel like it takes me two days to do a day's work.

And there's the rub. It never feels like enough. Always, it's "I should have accomplished more today."

According to whose measure? Who places that burden on me?

The calling is not to wear a cape, nor to have an "S" emblazoned on my chest.

The calling is not to do this or that number of tasks.

It is to do what I can within a day. And to get better at doing what I can within a day.

And on some days that may mean doing more than I did on a previous days

But on some days it may mean doing less.

Because....

Rest is allowed.

Rest is more than allowed.

Rest is where it all begins.

Act from rest.

And from the confidence that all will be well.

"My name is Elwin, and I'm an...

...entrepreneurial junkie."

I feel like saying that after the exercise I've just completed.

I went to the Pennsylvania Department of State's website, and I looked up all the businesses that I have created.

I had forgotten a few.

Since May 28, 1987, I have created four sole proprietorships, three limited partnerships, two for-profit corporations, two limited liability companies, and one non-profit corporation. That's a dozen entities, or nearly one every two years.

Why? Not just because I keep having business ideas so fantastic that they demand their own entities for execution. No, I think it's more a matter of loving the sense of possibility that comes with each fresh start. That, and the fact that fresh starts are so dang easy.

I love this about America: that anybody with a couple of hundred bucks can create a legal entity for doing business out of thin air, in 30 minutes.

Learning to run a company? An entirely different matter.

I remember reading that successful entrepreneurs start an average of x number of businesses that fail before they succeed. I don't remember what x was, but I think that on that score, I'm well-qualified.

Now to pursue the question, "What can I learn from my mistakes?"