Many of you who have heard me speak know that I had been greatly affected financially (like so many Americans) by what is now termed, “The Great Recession.” As a real estate attorney, broker, investor and developer, I was hit very hard by the real estate bust.

I was speaking with a new client yesterday and she was sharing with me how deeply affected she was by that time and how it makes her feel like a failure. That sentiment is shared by many and the affects from the recession are still very present in the lives of many Americans today. It has been a reoccurring theme I’ve been hearing a lot lately from clients and just from people in general which moved me to write about it today.

So, I just want to share with you what I shared with the client that I spoke to last night.

Failure and disappointment is something I’ve talked about repeatedly on Women on the Move. Although, I myself don’t even believe in so called “failures,” I do understand that the vast majority of people think in those terms. I happen to believe that every life experience comes to teach us a lesson. And if the lesson is learned from the experience, how could it possibly be deemed a failure? But for the purpose of this blog post, I will use the word failure in the way it is most commonly used.

Having obstacles and challenges to overcome in this life do not make you a failure.

You must pick up the coat of failure and put it on to claim it. It is not mandated for you.

You have to take the lessons that come from them, dust yourself off and push yourself forward. You can’t imprison yourself in a space and place that doesn’t allow you to move forward, because that just doesn’t serve you.

So, if you are in that place and space, whatever the failure in your mind may be, you must release it. It could be a perceived failure in a business, relationship, situation or a dream. I now ask you to let that perceived failure go. Take a moment to grieve it, if you so need. Cry, scream, get angry, write your feelings and disappointments down, do whatever you need to do to release it and then very simply – let it go. You must let it go.

Because if you don’t let it go, it will haunt you and it will destroy anything, and everything, you attempt to do moving forward. There’s a great quote by Iyanla Vanzant that says, “until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed.” And it will bleed in ways that you don’t even know. It will bleed into and onto things that you will be totally and completely unconscious about.

So, my prayer for you is that you learn to let it go and instead of sitting in the pain of that perceived failure and disappointment, you courageously get up, run on and proceed to your next level of being. I will be praying for you to get there and holding space for you there until you do.

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