Hi, this is Alicia. I’m writing this without permission while Alex is asleep.

Alex very nearly failed at delivering an email to your inbox this morning. He’s passed out on the couch where he’s been for the last 4+ hours, sweating out a fever.

While it would not have been a massive failure, it would have been a more or less noticeable lapse in his consistency.

The subject of failure has come up with some frequency in our conversations lately, and consequently always leads to us talking about our fears.

Fear holds all of us back from the one thing we need to do in order to move forward: taking action.

When you stop taking action, you remain stagnant. But when you take action, you put yourself at risk of failing.

It’s inevitable, and usually unexpected.

The way that you respond to failure will redefine your path. Getting knocked down will ultimately change you. There’s no way around that.

The way that you respond to it will determine your path from that point onward.

In both experience and observation, the more you withdraw and isolate yourself after a failure, the longer you will stay down. You create your own negative feedback loop.

Seems obvious, right?

But there’s one thing you can work on NOW to protect yourself from that.

Your safety net is your environment.

In the context of a business failure, your environment is the media you consume and the people you surround yourself with.

When you intentionally create a bubble of humans and content that move you forward, you have no choice but to go with the current.

For example, Clandestine Round Table member Dan posted today about five of his most massive failures. Alex sent an email recently to talk about what he’s failing at. As for me? I’m about 2 months behind schedule for my next launch.

Reading about failure, talking about it, and learning how to move through it removes the isolation and the paralysis from the negative feedback loop.

So when the content I jam down my own throat (mostly books and emails nowadays) consists of variations on the theme of, “set your goals and take relentless action,” and I’m interacting daily with others that I know are not only doing the exact same thing, but experiencing their own failures and still moving, I don’t stop and think about slowing down.

While I’m both a contributor to and merciless editor of The Sorcerers Guild print newsletter, I’m also a consumer of it. I used the Mindset Exercise toward the end of the inaugural scroll (which I unabashedly will take credit for creating), as a way to build my resilience. Every single time I’ve felt frozen, that exercise has helped me push through a wall.

If you received the latest scroll but you haven’t done the exercises yet, do them now.

If you missed out on the last one, you can still subscribe in time to catch the October scroll here:

http://sorcerersguildnewsletter.com/

Yours mystically,

Alicia Castaneda (+ the feverish spirit of Alexander Mullan)