Picture yourself gratefully receiving and accepting a life-changing gift - the gift of making mistakes, and failing. By giving yourself and others the gift of making mistakes and permission to fail, you will be allowing others and yourself to succeed faster.

"Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way, unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from." Al Franken

Failure is defined as the condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends.

Mistakes are defined as an error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness.

Rare thinking people like you already know that many of the very successful people from various fields failed numerous times before achieving their goals.

"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." Robert F. Kennedy

Remember when you first stopped to think about the following:

In America, a baseball player can sign a contract, which pays him a few million dollars a year... that same player misses the ball more often than he hits it when he steps up to the plate. The statistics for Babe Ruth are - for the 714 home runs he hit he struck out 1,330 time

You have most certainly heard of Michael Jordan who was kicked off of his high school basketball team on his way to becoming the legend he is today.

It is said that Thomas Edison attempted 10,000 different filaments before successfully creating the electric light bulb. In his mind none of his attempts were failures. They were each successful experiments in finding out what didn't work!

Henry Ford went bankrupt 3 times before he created a car that worked.

Colonel Sanders was 65 years old when he tried to sell his chicken recipe. He took this recipe to over 1,000 restaurants before he found a buyer.

Walt Disney spoke with over 297 banks before he was able to attain a loan for his successful dream.

The list of mistakes and failures prior to great success goes on and on. The one common denominator in each case is that the individual gave themselves the gift of making mistakes and experiencing failure.

Are you beginning to see that you may be intellectually and externally believing that it is o.k. to make mistakes, but that subconsciously you may not be giving yourself permission to make mistakes?

If you are not currently where you want to be, if you are not living your dreams and your purpose - there is likely something inside of you that is holding you back from accepting that it is alright and even good for you to make mistakes and possibly experience failure. You may not really believe that errors and failure are a necessary part of the process before you reach your definition of success. There is in fact no way around it.

Do you realize that when you are starting something new, you cannot be seeing the success right away as you are in the process of learning this new skill?

Granted the learning may come very quickly but there is that zone - where you are doing for the first time. Everybody pays a price for his or her success.

Now you may be thinking about people in your industry who appear to have had overnight success. Yet, I would wager that these same folks paid their price with a previous company or business.

Somewhere on their path folks decide to learn and do what will take them to their desired success. If they do not, the success is likely to be short lived.

The further you sink into this concept of mistakes as a gift; you will start to feel relief knowing that you are on your way to your desired results. Mistakes and errors can provide valuable insights into your development if you take the time to learn the lesson.

The only way to never make an error in judgment or to never fail at any attempt is simply to do nothing. Doing nothing will keep you stuck and you will surely not see your desired results.

Knowing how you came to be so critical of mistakes might help you move forward. You most certainly hold memories of your early years at home and at school; perhaps those are fond memories of love, fun, family and friends.

Perhaps they are memories filled with moments of embarrassment and humiliation because you did not meet your parents' expectations or because at school you did not hold the right answers to tests and examinations. Perhaps you lacked coordination and did not feel you could be valuable on a sports team.

For the most part, prior to some of the curriculum changes in the school system of the last 15-20 years, students were mostly taught that there was only one right answer and one right way to do things. Today we know differently.

As an adult, to continue to operate your life on falsehoods acquired as a youngster is not serving you. There are many ways to get things done and the truth in life depends on your perspective. If you hold feelings of "I am not good enough..." "I cannot do that..." the only person who can relieve you of that is you no matter where the belief comes from.

The further you look into this concept of allowing ourselves to make mistakes and errors, you will realize that only then will you be able to accept others when they make their mistakes and go through their failures. Wow...wouldn't that take a whole lot of pressure off of the home front.

Remember you cannot give away what you do not own. If you do not accept yourself unless you are succeeding, you will also not be accepting of others when they go through their trials.

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one." Elbert Hubbard

If we could all let go of being judgmental and critical of ourselves for our past mistakes, we would in fact be liberating ourselves from a sort of mental prison. This mental prison is what keeps the negative internal patterns ongoing and stops us from making the decision to take action, to learn, and see manifest what we desire.

Then and only then could we in fact be giving to others the precious and liberating gift - the gift of making mistakes - and to encourage them to get up with their head up, and keep moving forward to reach their success faster.