Failure
is a given in life; expecting to sail through without a hiccup is unrealistic
and sets you up to fall harder when failure does happen. Avoiding failure also
prevents you from focusing on gaining the resiliency needed to cope with it, a
vital element of bouncing back. Moreover, it is unfortunate that in societies
obsessed with success and achievement, failure can be made to feel like the
worst thing that could ever happen to a person. The reality is that failure is
commonplace but so is overcoming it and pushing through to more successful
endeavors in the future. Even where a failure cannot be salvaged, there is
always something to be learned from it. In this article, you'll learn a little
about how to overcome failure through staying focused on what matters to you.
When you don't let the mishaps of life keep you down too long, then nobody else
will be able to keep you down too long either.
1.
Expect mistakes. Life's hard knocks are
as common as life's success highs. To expect the process of living to always be
smooth sailing is to invite a lack of realism into your life. It happens to the
best of us. Failure helps to create balance in your life and presents an
opportunity for personal growth. Accepting the inevitability that things won't
always go your way is an important part of avoiding becoming bitter and
twisted, or of preventing yourself from simply resting on your laurels and
never pushing further to realize your full potential.
o Learn
to love finding out that you're wrong about something. That's not failure; it's
enlightenment and the path to finding the right way.
o Read How
to control perfectionism if this behavioral trait is holding
you back in life. Perfectionism causes us to fear failure and to feel we're
personally a failure when we're faced with it. Seeking to always be perfect
sows our own seeds of disappointment.
Trying and failing is a much better teacher of what it means to be human than
never trying and never succeeding.
Part 2 of 4: Staying focused on what matters
Remind
yourself that you are good enough. Leo Babauta
suggests that not believing we are good enough rests at
the heart of fearing failure.Failures serve as proof of this greatest fear,
causing us to want to withdraw and not try again for fear of being further
exposed as inadequate and incapable. However, this fear is not founded in
reality; nobody is perfect and everyone will err at various points in life. The
real difference between people who become successful and overcome failure and
those who do not comes down to how you manage failure and how you view its
impact on you. Feeling inadequate is a commonplace human feeling that even very
public, very successful people feel but they don't let it keep them down. You
are good enough; all you need is to give yourself the go-ahead to keep trying.
Remain calm.
Whatever you're feeling about a failure, don't lose your composure over it.
Look at it this way – it won't make any difference to the outcome itself
whether you blow your top or stay calm but it will take a lot less energy and
maintain your reputation
if you choose the latter response. If you're really frustrated and angry,
channel these emotions to motivate you to start again.
o Don't take
your anger out on others. It's not good to bottle up
feelings, but you can't go around taking out your anger on those around you for
no good reason. Go for a run, a swim, or a boxing session to relieve tension
and give you space to think. Just do something focused and energized to
distract yourself from the initial intense feelings until they calm.
o Take your
time.
People don't usually recover from a large failure overnight. It takes time for
the emotions to heal. That doesn't mean you're entitled to mope though. This
time is better spent going over how to do it better next time and building up
your resilience.
Part 3 of 4: Avoiding self comparison
Forget about
how other people view you. Not only will any very
obvious failure soon be yesterday's news, but if you think other people are judging you (and maybe they are, maybe
they aren't), it won't be long before they're too busy worrying about their own
failures to sling mud at yours. After all, everyone's going to fail now and
then; inflicting gloating on someone else has a way of boomeranging right back,
a reality which serves as a natural form of tapering off constant criticism. And
ultimately, what's it matter what the critics think? Most of the time they
haven't a clue what effort has gone into what you've done and what you're
trying to achieve – it's all too easy to be an expert critic without being
privy to the inside information.
o Allow
each failure to serve as an opportunity to strengthen your determination in the
face of criticism. This is a far more positive and self-sustaining response
than giving in to believing the often nasty and thoughtless things other people
can say.
Ask yourself
"who defines failure" anyway? You are not
defined by your career or your promotion achievements. Much of this is
competitive hype and a load of harsh judgments placed upon you to keep you in
line. Comparing yourself to others will cause you to feel the need to keep up,
only to find yourself on a rat wheel not of your choosing and most certainly
not tailored to what makes you feel better.
o Be
realistic. Most people get jobs, not careers or life vocations. The jobs pay
the bills. The rest of your life can flourish without making it all about the
job but you need to make that choice to put the job in a compartment and keep
it separate from the rest of your life. Letting the job bleed into everything
else will lose you the things you'd rather be doing.
Part 4 of 4: Turning failure into resiliency
Shift out of
your head space. All of the negativity is in
your head. The reality is that you will recover. And the bonus is that you will
gain knowledge, insight, and experience – wisdom that only those who tried
something can lay claim to. Step outside of your personal negative sphere and
reach out to the people around you who care about you; enjoy their company and
learn about how other people cope with failures instead of simply focusing on
yourself.
o Visualize each failure as a stepping stone to a
stronger, more resilient self. Treat each failure as a gift of learning what
not to do in the future.
o Respect
the humility that comes
with failure. Too much success can sometimes lead us astray and cause us to
grow an unwarranted sense of being infallible and feeling superior to others.
Failure can knock the stuffing out of such unrealistic self-aggrandizement and
help set you back on the right course.
Stop
worrying, start laughing.
Yes, the sun will come up again tomorrow. Yes, things might be miserable for a
little while but how will worrying help? Think back to a time when you worried
a lot. Did it make any difference? Most likely not, apart from giving you more
wrinkles and gray hair. The greatest thing you can do for yourself during
failure is to inject humor
into your reflection of what happened. While there will be a period in which
you feel especially tender, being able to laugh at yourself for mistakes can be
an important part of the healing process, readying you for moving on again.
Being able to say "Oh I did that, ha, ha, such a way to stuff up, ha,
ha!" is part of putting failure into perspective.
o Be
very careful that you don't take on other people's mistakes or circumstances as
being your failure. Humor is one way of telling you that you don't need
to carry the world on your shoulders and that sometimes, things just happen, no
matter what you do or do not do.
Review what
your failure has taught you. There are
always things to take away from a failure, to inform your future direction. It
might also be the case that you have made the failure seem worse than it is;
partial failure is also partial success and if you can draw out what was
successful and build on that, the sense of having failed lessens. Sociologist
Hugh Mackay believes that we don't value failure in the way we ought to.
Stating that failure is often interpreted as a sign of personal inadequacy, he
says that this denies its vital role as part of the process of maturation throughout
life. In other words, the learning never stops and the
lessons include:
o Failure
can help you discover your best self. Failure is a signal that you're willing
to press on and discover
new talents and the edge of your existing ones; reaching
beyond what you know into what you don't know.
o Failure
is about mastery. It's easy to flip from one new thing to another and be a Jack
or Jill of many skills but a master or mistress of none. It's much, much harder
to have the patience to master one thing really well and to do it with precision
and exactitude. And to master something, one must fail at it, a lot.
o Failure
teaches you about willpower, persistence,
self-discipline, and the value of hard work. One of the signs of living in fear
of failure is distraction. When you allow distraction
to overtake your life, you're comforted that your distractions can hide your
potential to fail. Ironically, distracting yourself is a failure in its own
right – a failure to take the time to keep trying, to continue toward
perfecting whatever you're learning to do or seeking to become. Ultimately,
failure teaches you the value of persistence and hard work.
Stay in the present. Fear of failure is
a future projection of worry and a reliance on what happened in the past. If
you're stuck in this kind of thinking, you're living life according to what might
happen. Author Leo Babauta suggests that the response needed here is to "just
do it, now, in the moment... bring yourself back in the moment and focus on
what you're doing right at this moment."By remaining in the present,
you stay focused on the potential of now and allow your creativity,
smarts, and innovative drive to bloom. Past failures are foundational lessons
for better understandings in the present and an improved sense of living now;
the future is created through your commitment to the present rather than your
present being lead by your fear of tomorrow's possible losses.
o Embrace fear. Failure can only keep
you down if you continue to fear it. Embrace the fear and you release yourself
from its control. Allowing fear to control you renders you vulnerable to being
controlled. Unchecked fear can cause you to let others make decisions for you
in life; while that may be a recipe for not taking responsibility
when things go wrong, it can also mean you lose your sense of creativity,
innovation, and even your sense of self. Help show people it's not only fine to
fail but healthy to break this fear!
Allow
yourself to fail on purpose. Personal
development guru Steve Pavlina recommends failing on purpose. He
suggests that it is a good thing to set out to do something that you know will
fail provided it won't harm others or have long-term negative consequences. He
recommends learning something in which you have no talent, trying something
beyond your skills set and asking for something when you know the answer will
be no (such as a raise, promotion, etc.). From doing this, Steve believes that you'll experience more
benefits than losses, such as learning how to handle failure, how to extract
key issues, knowing your limits, and unearthing the value of partial success.
Focus on
trying again. Dale Carnegie once said that
it was essential to "develop success from failures. Discouragement and
failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success." Persistence
is the source of success for the majority of people on this planet. Overnight
successes are rare; they are usually people who have been trying and failing
and trying again many times over. Successful ad man Siimon Reynolds believes
that lack of persistence is a
major reason as to why people fail; giving up too soon means that you'll never
know whether what you're seeking to do or be was achievable and he says that
this is the case for "the majority of people".
o Don't
confuse lack of persistence with a goal that's not possible to achieve; most
times it's the lack of persistence and not the goal that's the problem.
Naturally, doing things the exact same way that lead to failure is not the
answer; instead, focus on the goal and take the lessons from what didn't work
to show you how you can find new, improved ways to reach your goal this time.
Grow.
Popular motivational coach Anthony Robbins says that we don't just grow for
ourselves – we grow so that we can contribute
well beyond ourselves. This is an important thing to
remember when you're proceeding through failures. Your experiences are
available for others to learn from if you're willing to share them, as well as
being willing to share with others how you pushed beyond failure into a more
fruitful and fulfilling outcome, and even what happened when you couldn't
overcome the failure. This helps everyone become more understanding and
accepting of the role of failure in success-driven societies.
Ditch boredom and live
large. Failure is the flipside of success and
without it, there could be no joy in pushing through the odds, to know what
success truly feels like when achieved. At the end of the day, it's a funny
world where we're all longing for everything to be simple and easy without any
bumps on the road; the sooner you realize that life doesn't come with automatic
smoothing agents, the sooner you'll be happier about experiencing the bumps.
And just imagine how boring life would be if you had nothing to improve or aim
for! Keep in mind that the feeling of failure is the feeling of being alive.
It's a sign you've given things a go, pushed boundaries, and bounced back.
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