Many of our mistakes are overlooked or ignored, spelling errors or conversation gaffes. But you may have that one big mistake that is holding you back. Maybe you failed to meet a major goal or got fired or lost a business. Your mistake might be big enough that people are talking about it in your family, or in the news.

I’m not going to ask you to feel guilty about it. 

I’m not going to suggest you simply get over it. 

Like I said, we all have that one big mistake. It defines some part of our life and frames our thoughts and feelings in a negative way. The advice people sometimes give to “get over it” is not only useless, it’s impossible!

In a recent newsletter I sent out I mentioned the thousands of steps Edison took to produce the first working light bulb. But those were not really failures of any magnitude. They were an investment.

And they weren’t as big as the one failure that owns some part of your personal psyche.

But here is the mindset shift:

Take that failure and look at the steps it took you to get there. It wasn’t just one event in your life, it was a series of choices and decisions that ended poorly, but they led you to where you are today. If you reframe that failure in your mind, attach real value to the lessons you learned during and afterward, you will find that it was no different—as long as you don’t give up.

Now you can move forward when a new aspect or feeling comes up from that same failure. You can unpack it with a new perspective. After a short amount of time, you’ve made what used to be a mud pit into a solid foundation you can build on for your next success.

Don’t quit until you reach that one success that is the result of your learning. Then you understand what it was all for. Your success is the natural result of your failures when you keep going.

We all fail. Redeem your failure. Value the lessons learned from it. You will  change your trajectory.