Often we go through life and business with success after success without any serious set-backs.  We develop a good reputation based on excellent performance and a lifetime of goodwill.  Then comes a crisis, failure, or major mistake where people – your family, the media, your community, or your following – labels you, deserts you, and re-defines your lifetime of work and sacrifice over one big goof.  It’s ironic that you could do a thousand things right but one thing wrong and become defined by that one mistake in business or life.

The unfortunate part of all this is not just the label placed on you, but the feeling you develop of yourself that stifles your growth and at times even paralyzes your forward progress.  When we start to believe and buy into what some disenchanted people say, we head into a veritable abyss.  The old saying, “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” sounds good, but is hard to apply.

The key is not to ignore your mistake, but to put it in context, and to walk away from the negativity that surrounds it, and you.  You need to re-boot and see yourself as you really are or the issue will eat you alive.  We can’t let one mistake, no matter how great, define us as a person and stymie our existence or our future.

There’s another saying, “don’t let the (bad people) get you down.”  This is never as important as when you need to recast your way forward and to let the past be the past.  You are only as good as what you envision for the future, and you are only as bad as how you let others define you.  You are better than that.  Let that define you.

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