How do you react when things go wrong?

Man does defeat suck or what? You don’t want to think about it, talk about it, hear about it or relive it, do you? You may not even want to watch someone else go through it. I was watching American Idol again.

We want to talk about the good stuff - success, achieving goals, accomplishments, rewards, promotions, fun and money.

But we all know that defeat happens occasionally. Sometimes it comes in threes.

I checked the online Thesaurus for some synonyms for defeat and man it is depressing. Other words for defeat are devastation, hopelessness, annihilate, collapse, destruction, embarrassment, non-success, failure and overthrow.

Your attitude toward defeat will determine what happens in your future. It says a lot about you and it says a lot about your character. It impacts your children, your spouse, your family, your job, your friends and everything you do.

Defeat can help us learn if we will let it. It’s an attitude thing. But before you can learn from defeat you have to be teachable. This means you have to be willing to learn. Be willing to let someone teach you.

We have choices we can make when things go wrong. I see three ways to react to defeat – we can ignore what happened and continue on like everything is fine, we can give up, or we can accept it as an opportunity and a challenge to learn and improve so we don’t continue to make the same mistakes.

I realized that I needed to learn from defeat as I continued to make the same mistakes over and over. My response when things went wrong was to walk away figuring I could start over some where else. I figured this would solve things but it didn’t because I wasn’t changing. It’s like the definition for insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.

It’s likely your results or your behavior won’t change until you do. I wasn’t always very teachable but when I got to the place where I developed a relationship with God I realized I could change. So can you. Just ask me.