MANILA, Philippines — Quitting a resolution seems downright attractive—if not seeming particularly inevitable—when failure has slapped you in the face once too often.

Whether it’s a broken vow to finish that gym program once and for all, or a significant professional blunder that makes you feel your career is over, standing up to fight and lose again does not just seem to be an exercise in futility—it looks downright stupid.

As to the rejoinder of many career coaches that failure happens only when you quit—after all, how can you win if you don’t even try?—the less heartened would offer as an alternative a decision to accept “reality” by lowering their loftier ambitions.

True, that is a choice. And it can even be a realistic one at that. But this strategy bears rethinking after we’ve cried the last of our tears or hit the last pillow or wall in anger. Let’s say we quit all our resolutions to lose weight.

After we check ourselves out in the mirror and see all that extra poundage, can we honestly tell ourselves that we can live with that bulk for the rest of our lives? On a deeper level, can we live with the lingering regret if we quit our dreams once we are on our deathbeds? The pill might be a bitter pill to swallow, and far too late to give up.

Surf through the teachings of many career coaches, and the one thing they keep hammering is never identify with the failure or past mistakes. It does not mean ignoring them. To do so would mean living in a cloud of illusion that would not help one iota in our self-improvement.

Mistakes happen and limitations exist—acknowledge them no matter how difficult they may be, but turn them into advantages by learning from them and coming out stronger than before.

What the career coaches are saying is not identify with the mistakes and the “old self” that you want to lose. It means accepting what you are now, but realizing that what you have or what you are is not your ultimate destiny. You accept the caterpillar that you are at the moment, but look forward to the day that you will transform into a butterfly.

Losing the butterfly vision will just leave you where you are, stuck in the mud of despair and recrimination, with no desire or energy to move forward.

A choice of time zones

The gym workout illustrates the transformation clearly, to those of us weekend warriors who have stuck with it for some time. All that sweating and lifting that our more experienced and skilled physical therapists give us are based on the philosophy (and the medicine) that the excess fat is burned, to be replaced by healthier, stronger muscle.

As we do all those excruciating activities, fat thins and is replaced by muscle. Follow your gym program religiously for a couple of months and you’ll see a new physical you in the mirror.

Apply this analogy to self-identification. The fat is the old habit or the old self we want to burn away, to be replaced by the muscle of the new self. Practicing new habits can seem artificial sometimes, making us feel even hypocritical—but the more we do them, the more our old self is burned out, the more the new self emerges.

Failure and mistakes come par for the course, you don’t expect perfection the first time. But even if we make nine mistakes out of ten, we have to focus on the one time we keep good and keep repeating it—until it becomes the habit that replaces the old.

The process can be awkward, and may even make us look ridiculous to our friends. Sometimes, the transition can be as rough as that of a teenager leaving adolescent for adulthood. But practice does make perfect.

A friend of mine faltered and stammered during her first attempts at speaking as a leader in front of the company she managed. There were times her sentences didn’t make sense, or her insecurities were all too apparent. But she kept on, pushed by mentors and the books she read every night. There were several speeches where she made a mistake, but she finished them sometimes with a little bluster and bravado.

Then, against all odds and even our own fears, it happened. In one major event, she just went up on the stage, and spoke eloquently, passionately, persuasively. The audience stood up and applauded as she finished. That night, I saw my friend’s transformation from a caterpillar into a butterfly.

The butterfly is the fulfillment of the core of your soul, which we discussed last column. Keep it in mind all the time, especially the times when you want to quit.

Cora Llamas is a communications specialist and a magazine journalist grounded in various industries of the business sector such as human resources, BPO/call centers, among others. She is also editor of Health Today Magazine. Feedback welcome at corallamas2002@yahoo.com.