A scary story for Halloween

It being Halloween today, I want to tell you a scary story from my own life:

Many years ago, I had an ill-advised one-night stand with a friend of a friend. The next morning, as I was leaving the girl’s house, she told me she was flying home for two weeks. She lived in another country.

“Thank God,” I said to myself. “I won’t have to pretend to want to see her again.” So I told her to have a safe flight and I walked out of her life.

Or so I thought.

Because about six weeks later, I got a text message.

“Hi Bejako. It’s A. [Common friend] gave me your number. Could we meet? I have to talk to you and I’d rather do it in person.”

I could clearly hear a baby wailing somewhere nearby. Images of a shotgun wedding fired in my head.

We agreed to meet that evening in a cafe. I was there on time, she was not. With each passing minute, life drained out of my body and by the time the girl arrived, I had sunk so far in my chair that just my eyes were above the level of the table.

She sat down. She ran on for a few minutes, chipper and chatty.

I eventually collected enough strength to speak. “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

“Yeah…” she said with a bit of embarrassment. “I guess we should really get to it.”

It turned out she had started working with a life coach. And as part of her transformation, she was supposed to contact people from her past — such as one-night stand partners — and ask them,

“Do you have any feedback for me?”

That was it. No pregnancy. No marriage. No on Golden Pond.

At this point, I brightened considerably. I told her my feedback was she shouldn’t scare people like that. I also ordered four drinks in about 15 minutes and — lesson never learned — even tried to take the girl home again.

So what’s my point?

Well, for the past few days, I’ve been writing about ideas taken from NLP. And the scary story above popped up in my head when I read one such idea:

“Failure is only feedback.”

This is a way to reframe an instance of rejection or failure… take the sting out… and maybe even get something useful out of it.

Whenever I practice this approach to life, I always come out amazed and amused. Thing is, I often forget.

So I wanted to remind myself, and maybe you, to treat failure as feedback. And no better way to remember something than to tie it to a scary story.

And now for something even more scary:

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