Step back to step forward

Everyone knows the feeling of taking one step forward and then two steps back. We make a little progress, but that gets reversed. We feel as though we regressed instead of gaining ground.

This frustrates us. We don’t want to go backward. We want to race towards our goals at full speed. Anything less feels like it isn’t enough.

You don’t have to look hard to find quotes on the internet about learning from our setbacks. It is one of the most common types of quotes we can find.

Paulo Coelho is quoted as saying, “The secret of life is to fall seven times and get up eight times.”

J.K. Rowling said, “It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”

Even Oprah has said, “Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.”

With this common knowledge, it must be easy for us to handle setbacks. Yet, most of us struggle with it. It doesn’t feel good. The lessons often arrive years later. We need to be humble and face the fact that we aren’t perfect.

I believe these failures and setbacks are valuable ONLY if we can overcome them and learn from them, so we don’t keep making the same mistakes.

I recently read a military book discussing the end of the Vietnam war. It was incredible to read how it unfolded and what the final outcome was in that country.

Then I happened to read about the war in Afghanistan. Many of the lessons that it seemed we learned from Vietnam were absent. They say history repeats itself. While the situation was completely different, I was surprised to read about so many similarities.

After the Allies won WWII, they looked back at how they responded to victory in WWI. They realized that their punitive approach to Germany after WWI created the environment that was ripe for an evil leader to rise up. Instead, WWII concluded, and the Allies worked with countries like Japan to help them instead of punishing them.

I love reading about history because we can see these patterns. We see repetition. We see learning and changing. And there is enough time to evaluate how a decision played out.

But decisions are made in real time, not in retrospect. Everyone is a genius using hindsight. But when we need to make the decisions, we only have limited information.

Even when we make a poor decision and take a step or two backwards, we can learn from it. We can evaluate what went wrong and work to make sure that we don’t make the same mistake again.

We will all hit obstacles in life. Setbacks will happen. If we don’t take the time to learn from mistakes, we will keep making them. Making a mistake is inevitable. Making it again is a flaw in how we handled that mistake.

We need to find a better way. We need to be strategic in our life. Most people go through the motions and don’t think more than 2 steps ahead. We must learn to see ahead and plan our approach, learning from our past.

By doing this, we will start to see the patterns flip. Instead of making the same mistakes over and over we will start to learn what not to do. We will avoid those traps and continue to make progress. When we take a step forward, we maintain that push, not slip two steps backwards.

While those steps back are inevitable at times, we must find a way to learn and change so they don’t cause us to keep regressing away from our goals and desires in life.