Ecological Human Services Management

The psychology of success and failure is complex but not particularly hard to understand. It starts with personal responsibility. Unless you accept the responsibility for failure, you can't take the credit for success. Either you are the agent of your life outcomes or the victim of people who are pushing you down. Here's the point. If you blame others for pushing you down, people other than you deserve the praise for pushing you ahead. Separating yourself from what you do comes next. As William D. Brown put it, "Failure is an event, never a person." Your success and failure aren't who you are. They are merely what you do. S.I. Hayakawa expanded on the same theme, "Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, ‘I have failed three times,' and what happens when he says, ‘I am a failure.'" The key is in how you manage life's events, not in the events themselves. Robert Allen expressed it like this, "There is no failure. Only feedback." Now consider what you do with the feedback life pr