As I have walked with thousands of families through financial problems that drained them of all hope, I have realized that there are reasons we lose our hope. Our minds and spirits have to believe lies in order to lose the most precious item called hope.

One big hairy lie that we allow to steal our hope is that failure is permanent. We see the failure in our past as an indicator of our future, our hopeless future, our only possible future. Winston Churchill, the great British prime minister, said, “Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” When we believe failure is here to stay, we lose enthusiasm and the ability to head back toward success.

Hope is stolen when we misunderstand failure. Failure is natural and normal, and it is going to happen. The way to reach your goals is to keep failure in its cage. Failure is caged when we realize it is not permanent. Caged failure is a building block. If we take all the lessons learned from failure and stack them, we can easily get the breathtaking view that hope gives. Henry Ford said, “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” The trick is to avoid making short-term decisions based on loss of hope, which have even worse long-term effects.

When people are in financial difficulty, they often make stupid, short-thinking financial decisions. If you really believe you can never save enough money to pay cash for a car, you lose hope and borrow the money. Debt, which robs your ability to build wealth, is usually the result of lost hope. We have been sold debt so thoroughly that it has stolen our hope. People who have hope, grown from visions based in values, are savers and investors; they think long-term. Where there is a lack of hope, we cripple our ability to build wealth and long-term relationships of value.

When past failure sneaks up and steals our hope, we must have been asleep at the wheel, because we know better; we -realize that failure is part of the process. Have you done something stupid or wrong in the past that you are still reliving daily? Is that memory haunting you and stealing your hope and your destiny? Remember, the past has power over you only if you give it that power. The past can hurt, but you can either run from it or learn from it.
__________________

Dave Ramsey’s financial advice appears every week in Quick & Simple. He is the host of the nationally syndicated radio program The Dave Ramsey Show and best-selling author of The Total Money Makeover and Financial Peace Revisited.