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We tend to categorize the people we come across in life.
We have friends who are supremely computer-literate, friends who are master bargainers, and we know people who are fitness freaks. There are many categories which we can group the people we know by.
An interesting exercise of self reflection is analyzing ourselves and which categories others group us into. You may be grouped as a go-getter, or lazy and not punctual.
The categories you’re grouped under help those who group you in those categories interact with you. They’re quick shortcuts, and rather than analyzing your skills anew every time they interact with you, people tend to remember your general skills and tendencies.
If our friends are at the local park playing basketball and need a teammate, they’ll likely call us out if they perceive us to be good at basketball. If our coworkers have a presentation to make at work, they’ll ask us to evaluate their skills if they hold our own presentation skills in high regard.
Self-Fulfilling Labels
The groupings you fall into throughout life will dictate how people communicate with you, and to an extent, treat you. These groupings also include broader labels, such as general winners and losers.
If you have a habit of working hard, being responsible, and achieving higher levels of success in life, you’ll be marked as a person with a winning mentality. However, if you find yourself consistently sulking in losses, being let down by everyday failures, and preventing yourself from achieving the goals that you’ve set for yourself, you may be categorized as a failure in the eyes of others.
These categories are important in your day-to-day life because they are self-fulfilling and difficult to reverse. People who interpret you as someone with a winning mentality will do their part in helping you fulfill that role.
Whether that be performing at a competition, or simply having plans go right in our day-to-day, the perception of being a winner will cause the people around you to reinforce that label. They will help you out in times of need, they will uphold your reputation when speaking about you with others, and simply expect you to do well. This expectation is powerful in maintaining, and being labelled as a failure in any domain should be avoided if at all possible.
Failing Is Normal and Healthy, Being a Failure Is Not
This article is not advising to avoid failure, or avoid speaking about failure at all costs. However, you should learn from failures and prevent them from happening again. A winner’s mentality can still be applied to failing in certain aspects of life, so make sure you always analyze your failures from a perspective of self-improvement.
Continuously sulking in your failures, speaking about them with others, and not learning the proper lessons they entail can cause you to be labelled as a failure. For the reasons mentioned above, once people expect failure from you, they will look for it. Everything you do will be expected to fail before it is expected to succeed, and you’ll consistently be fighting an uphill battle in any venture you partake in.
It is very important to know when speaking about our failures is a good idea. Publicizing your failures can definitely help your story be more interesting. It will make you even more of a winner should others see that you’ve overcome your failures.
Once again, this article is not advising you to stop publicizing any of your failures. However, be weary of publicizing a consistent streak of them. Don’t allow yourself to fall into being labelled as a failure.
Let your failures cause you pain and teach you lessons, publicize the right ones but be careful about voicing streaks of them into the world. The more consecutive failures you publicize, the higher the chance that people will grow to expect them from you. Your words will be taken seriously, and people will form perceptions based on those words.
The Malicious Traits in Others
There are people who find honest joy in the failures of others. They yearn to hear about your failures, and try their best to ensure of their existence in the future. If these people are people you rely on, say, to evaluate your performance at work or your eligibility for getting a promotion, it may cause you problems.
It’s often difficult to determine who exactly takes pride in our failures, so the best approach to preventing malicious acts is to limit how much we talk about our bad streaks.
Avoid sulking in your losses without bringing yourself back to strength and maintaining a winner’s mentality. Some people will feel good about themselves when they see you taking failures to heart, and will want to keep that feeling alive into the future.
Don’t give the malicious people in your life the joy of relishing in your streak of failures. They may have a direct effect on your successes, and will do anything in their power to continue seeing you fail.