Choosing Not Losing

Some years ago in another life, I was a psych nurse. I’ve always been interested in psychology and interactions / reactions and one of the books I read as a student nurse really struck a chord with me. It was called choosing, not losing and was written by Dorothy Rowe.

The book is about overcoming reactive depression, basically by recognising when it’s time to make a choice to change some aspect of your behaviour before it gets to the stage where you no longer have the free will to do so.

For me the title says a lot about who we are. Choosing is an active reaction, losing is a passive one. Choosing, in this instance is about taking action and responsibility for it, losing is about giving up or not taking responsibility for the consequences of an action that you chose…

It applies to any area of life including internet marketing. We can choose to move forward, learn from our mistakes, take responsibility for our choices and live with the consequences, whether they bring what we hoped for or not, or we can lose out by abdicating responsibility for the choices we made and preferring to believe that the consequences we face are someone elses fault and nothing to do with us.

If we fail to take responsibility for our choices, we fail to learn from our mistakes. We are human, there is nobody on the this earth who has never made mistakes. The most successful people are often those who have made the most mistakes and then kept going until they learned to stop making them..

Don’t fear your mistakes, embrace them, learn from them and choose to do better next time. Think of Rocky’s motivational speech to his son in Rocky 6, something along the lines of - it’s not the amount of times that you get knocked down that counts, it’s your ability to keep getting up and keep moving forward.

I’ve even heard a few people say that you should make lots of mistakes as fast as you can to get that part of the learning over with - though I don’t really hold with that approach myself if I can help it lol

Think for a couple of moments about some of the mistakes you made recently:

Did you choose to learn from them or did you want to avoid thinking about them, preferring not to acknowledge them and hope they’d just go away of their own accord? Successful people choose to learn from them, that’s the only difference between successful people and not so successful people..

Successful people have failed and learned more, got up and moved forward more often..

Doesn’t that sound possible?

Embrace your mistakes and your failures, learn from them, pick yourself up and move forward. It’s possible, something we can all do, remember - choosing, not losing is the way to go and enjoy your path to success.