When I did my initial hypnotherapy training, it also covered NLP. NLP has a number of underlying presuppositions (which are an unbiased and compelling set of beliefs).

My favourite one of these presuppositions is that there is "no failure, only feedback". What this means is that if things don't quite go to plan, you review what happened and see what you can learn from the experience. You do this without focusing on the 'failure' but do it with a curious, solution focused mindset, seeing it as a way to learn from any mistakes, so that you can change, and develop, and evolve.

If you look around the room that you are in right now, I would guess that 100% of the items that surround you, including the walls, were developed through trial and error. If those inventors and developers hadn't persevered, we may never have had the benefit of electricity, lightbulbs, our phones or computers, or that lovely chocolate biscuit or cake! Do you think that they gave up when things didn't go to plan the first time? Do you think they learned from their 'mistakes' or just gave up?

If you failed an exam but when you looked back you realised that you didn't really bother to revise, the learning would be that next time you would make sure that you planned and undertook enough revision, rather than beating yourself up for not revising enough. You attach no negative emotions or unhelpful thinking habits to the situation, the aim is to gain a better understanding...really, it is learning from hindsight. Unfortunately when we usually hear the word hindsight, it is most often when someone is being negative or critical.

A few weeks ago I was looking through Linked In and saw that someone else was talking about this very thing, but had given it a name. As you can see, it can take a little effort to explain the above, but I loved the fact that this person (a lady called Emma Lloyd) used the term 'Kindsight'. She is by no way the first person to use this but I thought that it perfectly (and positively) summed up this way of dealing with setbacks in just one word!

So guess what new word I have added to my vocabulary!

Try using Kindsight when you next experience a setback and see how it changes how you feel about whatever challenge life threw at you!

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