Openblue’s Blog

The real X factor. December 15, 2008

The X factor helped to create yet another future super star on Saturday evening. Millions saw Alexandra Burke win the competition and a recording contract worth one million pounds. Simon Cowell says that he will help her become even bigger than Leona Lewis who won the competition in 2006.

The greatest part about this success story for us is that Alexandra competed in this competition 3 years ago and did not make it, which reminds us of one of the key presuppositions of NLP which is “there is no failure, only feedback”

So what does this mean?

Many people look at temporary set backs in their lives as failures and consequently give up their fight to achieve their goals. Had Alexandra Burke done that when she didn’t make it 3 years ago, she may not have even bothered to enter the competition again. But she had a dream of winning the competition so big that she was not put off by the temporary setback.

The presupposition “there is no failure, only feedback” is very powerful in that, no matter what result you get, if you look at it as a learning experience and therefore give your self the necessary feedback you need to be able to do things differently next time, it is always a better option than saying that you have failed.

Take a look at the things you have done in your life in the past where you may have wrongly labelled them as failures and re-evaluate them using this presupposition “there is no failure, only feedback” How can you learn from the results you got back them and apply the learnings in order to get different results next time round?

Remember, it took Thomas Edison over 9,999 attempts to create the electric light bulb and on every time he didn’t achieve his desired results; he didn’t look at them as failures, but looked at how he could learn from it. He said that “I didn’t fail 9,999 times, I found over 9,999 ways how NOT to create the electric light bulb.

Try this presupposition on for size over the next 30 days and see how different you think about situations. When you realize that this works in so many aspects in you life it will change the way you think for ever.