Today I spoke with a participant who described her past quit attempts as a string of failures. This is something I hear a lot in my job. “My past quits were a waste of time.” “I flunked.” “Every time I’ve quit I’ve crashed and burned.” Ouch.

Participants are harder on themselves than anyone else ever could be. A little part of me sighed inside when today’s participant said: “My confidence is low, because I’ve never been able to do it before.” It’s hard. Learning something new is always a process.

We can make all sorts of analogies: you don’t jump from arithmetic to calculus, you don’t decide to move to France and suddenly know French, and who among us passed their driver’s license test on the first try? (Okay, maybe that was just me.)

The little of part of me that sighed when today’s participant expressed low confidence is the same part that wants to defend her past quits. It’s an interesting situation. From my third-party vantage point, I see any past quit attempt as an important precursor to success. These “failures” actually bring her closer to quitting. If she can use the experience to gain confidence instead of squash it. Sometimes it just takes a Quit Coach to point that out.

Every time a person tries to quit, she can learn something new. Perhaps a person concludes cold-turkey is too painful and decides to use the patch next time. Or maybe a person realizes that work stress is a major relapse trigger and makes a more detailed plan for dealing with it in the future.

These aren’t failures. These are steps that had to be taken in order to implement the changes that lead to success. Learning from past challenges makes the difference between failure and success.