How to Overcome Failure: 9 Powerful Habits
“Failures are finger posts on the way to achievement.”
C. S. Lewis
“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t tolerate not trying.”
Michael Jordan
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett
Oftentimes things go Fine or even better than that.
Yet on some days they don’t.
You make a mistake, suffer setback or you just fail. It’s no fun. Yet you can’t prevent it either unless you forgo doing anything at all.
So what’s required is a clever and self-kind approach to manage such circumstances instead of allowing them escalate to savage self-beatings and to them pulling you down into pessimism for the day or month.
This week I’d like to share 9 behaviors that have helped me with that. I hope these will be beneficial for you too.
1. Initially, simply accept how you feel.
2. Remember: you’re not a failure simply because you suffered a setback.
After you’ve suffered a setback it’s quite tempting to start believing that you will constantly keep failing in this area of your life. It’s easy to start believing that YOU are truly a failure.
Don’t fall for such a damaging and occasionally attractive self-fulfilling prophesy.
Instead, remind yourself that:
Just because you failed today or yesterday doesn’t indicate that you’ll fail the following time.
The fact is that this won’t persist for the rest of your life if you keep going ahead, if you take action and you keep learning and it doesn’t label you as some type of failure (unless if you chose to make that label in your own brain) (except if you decide to create that label in your own head).
Viewing what’s terrible as a transient thing instead of something permanent is a crucial component to an optimistic mindset and to keep moving ahead in life.
3. Be positive and learn from this scenario.
Consider it more as helpful feedback and something you can utilize to progress rather than merely a massive blow and setback.
I’ve discovered that the easiest and most useful approach to accomplish that is to ask myself better questions (instead of the standard ones that send you off into a negative spiral) (instead of the common ones that send you off into a negative spiral).
Questions like:
What’s one thing I can learn from this?
How can I modify my route to avoid this trap/making the same error and likely perform better next time?
What’s one thing I can differently the next time?
Take some time with these questions and be honest with yourself as you answer them.
There’s no urgency and although some of the answers may be quick others can take an hour, day or even a week to crop up.
The main thing is to start thinking about the problem from this viewpoint and to be constructive about things instead of becoming caught in denial or negativity and indifference.
4. Remind yourself: anybody who wants to achieve something of worth in life will fail.
We frequently largely simply hear about people’s triumphs.
Yet the journey to achieving milestones tends to include numerous failures. The tale of someone’s achievement may look only brilliant and fast-moving in what's reported in the media or we see in our imaginations.
Yet the truth – and the practical method to face failures – is most frequently more like this comment by Michael Jordan:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots throughout my career. I’ve lost over 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again throughout my life. And that is why I succeed.”
5. Let it out into the light.
Another great technique to manage the emotional consequences and the ideas that arise from a failure is to not keep it all bottled up within.
But to let it out into the light by discussing it out with someone close to you.
By ranting about it while the other person simply listens you may figure things out for yourself, assist yourself to accept what occurred instead of pushing it away and relieve that inner strain.
By having a talk about the topic you may view it from another perspective and through someone else’s eyes.
This individual may enable you to ground yourself in reality again, to encourage and to possibly even to discover a route ahead.
6. Get inspiration and encouragement from your world.
A talk with someone close to you may be quite useful.
Another thing you may do is to learn from people who’ve gone where you wish to go.
Learn about how they managed difficulties and low-points before or during their achievement in books, on websites or online forums.
Alternatively you can just draw into the energy or inspiration of someone else by listening to a podcast or audio book for maybe 30-60 minutes.
This may not be particularly about your present difficulty but might enable you to adjust your attitude and perspective back towards positivity again.
7. Move ahead again, don’t become lost in thinking this circumstance over for too long.
Analyzing the circumstance and accepting it is vital.
Yet I know from experience that it’s also simple to become trapped in the same ideas running around and around for week or a month.
The habit that has helped me with this trap is to take what I learn from questions like the ones I provided in tip #3 and to build a little rough plan for how I want to go ahead from here.
So I take some time to sit down and type that one out.
8. Take action on that strategy straight quickly once you’ve written it out.
The strategy you come up with will merely be a start. You may course-correct later on, along the route.
So you don’t have to make it flawless.
Attempting to accomplish that might sometimes simply be a method to delay because you fear failing again or because it is hard to start going after this painful and unsettling incident that occurred to you.
Divide your start of a plan up into little stages and then take action on just one of them.
If you still have a hard time to start going then try for a very little step, simply 1-5 minutes of movement ahead. The main thing is to get started and going ahead again so make it simple for yourself.
9. Increase your self-esteem.
A final thing that has helped me in general to endure disappointments is to boost my self-esteem.
By doing so failures don’t become something that so readily pulls me down and I recover more quickly from them.
It also makes it easier to see what occurred with greater clarity and to accept responsibility where I am accountable but also to recognize when someone else is partially responsible or when I simply had poor luck that I could honestly not have expected.
And it helps me to not believe that everything that goes wrong in my life is 100% my fault.
So how can you boost your self-esteem?
A smart start would be to utilize most of what you discover in this article.
Like remembering that YOU are not a failure, that everyone experience failures, to be constructive in the face of adversity and so forth.
By performing these activities again and over and making them habits your self-esteem increases.
And over time a minor setback may simply bounce off of you and a bigger one will not be the same blow as it used to and the shock and climb back up from what occurred becomes simpler and not something that is as paralyzing anymore.
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