Learning from failure

Starting a new relationship is scary. Especially if you feel you failed fantastically in the past.

When planning a trip it’s important to know where you don’t want to go. When I first started entertaining the idea of finding love again, I wasn’t entirely certain what I wanted, but I’ve known from the beginning what I don’t want. I don’t want to get divorced again.

Working in operations, when something goes wrong (an outage, a missed deadline, an injury, etc.) we investigate the cause and figure out how to prevent a recurrence.

We do a post mortem.

To move forward in my life I need to reflect on what didn’t work in the past.

Not everything about my marriage was horrible and wrong. However, there were definitely ways it didn’t feel right from the beginning, and ways it became broken that we never took the time to repair.

A good post-mortem is conducted in a “blameless” manner. We’re not looking for who to blame and punish. I can’t just point at my ex and say if she wasn’t this way or that way things would have ended up fine. I need to own the fact that I’m part of the problem.

The Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the end of a relationship were present in my marriage for years:

• Criticism

• Contempt

• Defensiveness

• Stonewalling.

Any outsider looking in could have seen it. But I chose to live in denial.

Lesson number one from the post mortem on my marriage: be completely honest about your reality. Don’t deny the facts staring you in the face. They don’t need to be moralized as good or bad. They just are. We live in reality. Choosing to not recognize it for what it is, is choosing to live blind when you could have sight.

Don’t wait for a huge failure like a divorce.
Dissected and learned from mistakes big or small.

What lessons have you learned from your failures?
How can you prevent your past mistakes from repeating in the future?

That’s all for now.
Talk more tomorrow.
- Daniel Otto Spencer Polehn