Failure is defined as a lack of success, but its true definition is really up to you. Small things can be failures.
Maybe you blew an easy sale today at work, or forgot to grab something important when you were at the store. We all make mistakes, and the mistakes we make that have some weight to them—big or small—make us feel like we've failed.
We all struggle and experience failure. All of us. No matter how good someone looks on the outside, how perfect their life appears, they carry around their own self-doubts, their secrets or pain.
Your therapist struggles, your pastor struggles, the strong and beautiful woman you see each morning as you drop your kids off to school, she struggles. It is a simple truth of life.
To make failure your friend and not your enemy, you must overcome it.
Failure, pain, and struggle are not your identity. They are simply part of your story. Not the fullness of it.
Remember, failure is inevitable, but it's not something that has to define you. It's actually good for you, and setting yourself up for it can be good for you too.
Make failure a tool, a stepping stone, to get you where you want to go. It's okay to feel defeated when it happens, but losing the battle never means losing the war.
But struggle does not mean we are a failure. Even failing at something does not mean we are a failure.
Here are some strategies for moving on after a tough break.
Remember: you’re not a failure just because you had a setback.
When you’ve had a setback it’s very easy to start thinking that you will always keep failing in this area of your life. It’s easy to start thinking that YOU are indeed a failure.
Don’t fall for such a destructive and sometimes seductive self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead, remind yourself that:
Just because you failed today or yesterday doesn’t mean that you’ll fail the next time.
The truth is that this won’t last for the rest of your life if you keep moving forward, if you take action and you keep learning and it doesn’t label you as some kind of failure (except if you decide to create that label in your own head).
Seeing what’s negative as a temporary thing instead of something permanent is an essential key to an optimistic attitude and to keep going forward in life.
Remind yourself why it’s important.
It’s easy to give up on something, because not doing it is always easier. But giving up means you’re losing something important, like helping someone, and so if my reasons for doing something aren’t just selfish (pleasure, vanity), then I will renew my vigor for the struggle.
This alone is often enough to get me going again, especially if I’m doing it to help someone important.
I realize that I’m far from perfect, and that the guilty secrets I hide inside myself are no different than anyone else’s.
You guys are just like me, in the inside, and while we all share the commonality of failing to live up to our better nature, we also share the bond of being able to start again. Your goal should be progress, not perfection.
Be constructive and learn from this situation.
See it more as valuable feedback and something you can use to improve rather than only a big blow and setback.
I’ve found that the simplest and most helpful way to do that is to ask myself better questions (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 adjust my course to avoid this trap/making the same mistake and likely do 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 rush and while some of the answers may be immediate others might take an hour, day or even a week to pop up.
The important thing is to start thinking about the situation from this perspective and to be constructive about things instead of getting stuck in denial or negativity and apathy.
Every attempt is about learning.
When you fail, that’s actually really good information. Before you failed, you thought that something would work (a prediction), but then real-world information came in that told you it didn’t work.
That means you now know something you didn’t know before. That’s excellent. Now you can adjust your plan, figure something new out, try a new method. Keep learning.
Embrace Your limitations.
We are all messy, imperfect people. Some of us have health issues to contend with or other difficult circumstances in our life that are part of our honest reality at the moment. We have personality quirks, we carry baggage from our pasts, we are all works in progress.
Making peace with, or embracing our limitations does not mean complacency or disengaging. But it might mean surrender to what is in the moment.
Some of our limitations might be things we work at overcoming while others are simply out of our control. Making peace with this can go a long way to helping us live with peace and joy even in the middle of the storm.
I no longer actually think of “failure” as a dirty word. I am, we all are, a mixed bag of strength and struggle; this is part of our incredible story as imperfect but beautiful created beings.
Remind Yourself of Your Past Successes…
Failing doesn’t mean that you’re worthless, or that you’ll never achieve the things you want. Think of all the times in the past when you’ve succeeded.
Maybe you got a promotion that you worked for last year, or you had a great GPA in college, or you lost weight, or you learned to play a musical instrument. You might want to write down a list of successes – things that you’ve accomplished over the past few years, whether big or small. If you ever lack confidence, you can go back and read over that list.
…And Your Past Failures
Your past successes are important … but so are your past failures. You’ve made mistakes before, and you’ve survived them. Perhaps you did badly in an exam, or screwed something up at work, or lost your temper and had to apologize.
It’s not fun to think about the times when things went wrong, but by acknowledging your failures, you can remind yourself that today is no different. Just as you recovered in the past, you can recover from your recent failure too.
Explore Expand Adapt and Keep On Going
Learning has no age and no end either. You need to keep exploring the opportunities that will help you to be successful. Knowledge is power – change your life with knowledge and experience.
Keep finding new ways and be innovative in your approach. Remember that successful people are not different but they do things differently.
If you need to learn new skills to secure your chances of being successful then go ahead and learn them, even if it requires you to join some course or attend workshops.
There’s no better guide to being successful than your competitors and the one’s who’re on the top – “If they can do it, you too can.”
You don’t only have to adopt this motto, but get on to observing and analyzing them. Find out what they did, which you didn’t – to be successful.
It’s not necessary that what works for others will work for you, but you’ll surely get the basics right, and you can configure the details yourself thereafter.
How easy it is to solve a problem when you have a solved example of a similar problem before you – isn’t it?
In the same way, you’ve successful people before you who’ve most probably been on the same path as you. Treat them as the solved examples and solve your problems by learning from them.
Explore your inner self and the outer environment. Help yourself with all the information and tools that you find, which will help you craft your way to success.
You can create your life options for success. It’ll help you overcome the obstacles in life and achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself.
These are your keys to success that you can use anytime and anywhere. They’re ALWAYS in your hands.
Remind yourself: anyone who wants to do things of value in life will fail.
We often mostly just hear about people’s successes. But the path to those milestones tends to have many setbacks. The story of someone’s success may seem only bright and fast-moving in what’s told in the media or we see in our minds.
But the reality – and the useful way to approach setbacks – is most often more like this quote by Michael Jordan:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 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 in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Take time to recover and start over
Failure shouldn’t stop you from trying out something new. It makes you stronger and better prepared for new projects. Yes, failure is undesirable.Yes, failing is never what we plan for when we pursue a goal.
However, more than likely, you will recover from failure. Once you’ve recovered, you are better equipped to chase after more dreams, more secure in knowing that you’ve survived a failure.
Challenge the Voice of Your Inner Critic.
You do not have to listen helplessly as that inner critic of yours rips you to shreds. Not everything you hear is true or helpful. Talk back. Stand up for yourself like you’d stand up for your best friend.
So what if there is some truth mingled in with the lies – remember that we are all imperfect, we have all failed in some ways – that does not mean you have to sit there and receive a beating. Stop letting hypothetical stories play out in your brain – you have the power to control your thoughts. You can learn to shift your thoughts and break the cycle of damaging behavior that is borne of those thoughts (getting help to learn this can be life-changing).
Seek advice from trusted others.
Instead of feeling that you must go it alone, talk with others you trust and get their input. You may have a blind spot as to certain aspects of your character or be unable to see clearly what you did that resulted in failure. Friends, loved ones, family members, co-workers and others whose counsel you value will offer encouragement and support that can help you get through this rough time.
Accept how you feel.
When you’ve just failed it will most likely hurt. Sometimes a bit. Sometimes a lot.
That’s OK. Don’t try to push it away by distracting yourself or by trying to push the responsibility onto the rest of the world (if you deep down know that this one’s on you partly or fully). And don’t try to paint it over with a smile.
I’ve found that it works better to not let yourself be lead away by those options or impulses.
But to just be with what I’m thinking and feeling. To try to accept it, to let it in and to hurt for a while instead of trying to reject it all and to keep it away.
Because when you let it in and accept it then it will go faster and in the long run be less painful to process what has happened.
If you reject how you really feel then those emotions will pop up at unexpected times later on and can make you moody, pessimistic, angry or sad.
Practice Noticing Your Wins.
A simple but powerful exercise I practice each night is the 3/2/1 exercise. Give it two weeks and notice the shift it can make in the way you feel about yourself. Before sleep, as you lay in bed, take a few deep, slow breaths, noticing the rise and fall of your lower belly. Ask yourself:
what are 3 things I am grateful for today? What are 2 things I did well today (this part is hard for so many women and I encourage you to take the time needed to identify your “wins”)? What is 1 thing I would do differently next time? This last step is about growth not criticism.
Always remember: you have more than one shot to create the life you want.
You will screw up at some point in life, and that’s okay so long as you learn from them and figure out a different path towards the same goal.
The biggest screw up you can make is to just give up and accept that you can’t succeed because of you who you are or where you come from. If you are going through hell, don’t stop. And if you catch hell, don’t hold it.
So start again when you get it wrong. People who overestimate what they’re capable of are far more likely to actually, get off their ass and try.
You will stumble, you may fail, but you are not your failure!
One thing is absolutely certain, if you REALLY want to succeed in life, if you want to do something special, something incredible, if you want to fulfill your dreams… failure is inevitable.
Make the necessary change to achieve your goals.
The solution may not require you to change yourself or your ways completely. But you need to do that in some ways, and you’ve to make efforts to know exactly in what ways.
You need to analyze the problem and your strategy. Try to use your logic and common sense to find a pattern of failure, if there’s any.
Spot out your bad habits that might be one of the causes of your downfall or failure. Make an effort to change your habits and adopt the good habits required to be successful.
You need to be dedicated, highly motivated and determined, besides being courageous and self-confident. If these qualities aren’t there or fully developed in you till now, then work on them.
Of course, you also might need to change your attitude – that makes a hell of a difference. You might need to change the ways of how you react to certain situations or things to be successful.
Changing your ways, methods or strategies might solve your problem. You need to be optimistic and keep trying out new things.
Change yourself to make yourself competent. If there are certain criterions of success that can be improved upon in order to be successful and to rise up, then you need to explore and learn them.
Though you fall, you are not a failure. Pick yourself back up
Maybe you blew an easy sale today at work, or forgot to grab something important when you were at the store. We all make mistakes, and the mistakes we make that have some weight to them—big or small—make us feel like we've failed.
We all struggle and experience failure. All of us. No matter how good someone looks on the outside, how perfect their life appears, they carry around their own self-doubts, their secrets or pain.
Your therapist struggles, your pastor struggles, the strong and beautiful woman you see each morning as you drop your kids off to school, she struggles. It is a simple truth of life.
To make failure your friend and not your enemy, you must overcome it.
Failure, pain, and struggle are not your identity. They are simply part of your story. Not the fullness of it.
Remember, failure is inevitable, but it's not something that has to define you. It's actually good for you, and setting yourself up for it can be good for you too.
Make failure a tool, a stepping stone, to get you where you want to go. It's okay to feel defeated when it happens, but losing the battle never means losing the war.
But struggle does not mean we are a failure. Even failing at something does not mean we are a failure.
Here are some strategies for moving on after a tough break.
Remember: you’re not a failure just because you had a setback.
When you’ve had a setback it’s very easy to start thinking that you will always keep failing in this area of your life. It’s easy to start thinking that YOU are indeed a failure.
Don’t fall for such a destructive and sometimes seductive self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead, remind yourself that:
Just because you failed today or yesterday doesn’t mean that you’ll fail the next time.
The truth is that this won’t last for the rest of your life if you keep moving forward, if you take action and you keep learning and it doesn’t label you as some kind of failure (except if you decide to create that label in your own head).
Seeing what’s negative as a temporary thing instead of something permanent is an essential key to an optimistic attitude and to keep going forward in life.
Remind yourself why it’s important.
It’s easy to give up on something, because not doing it is always easier. But giving up means you’re losing something important, like helping someone, and so if my reasons for doing something aren’t just selfish (pleasure, vanity), then I will renew my vigor for the struggle.
This alone is often enough to get me going again, especially if I’m doing it to help someone important.
I realize that I’m far from perfect, and that the guilty secrets I hide inside myself are no different than anyone else’s.
You guys are just like me, in the inside, and while we all share the commonality of failing to live up to our better nature, we also share the bond of being able to start again. Your goal should be progress, not perfection.
Be constructive and learn from this situation.
See it more as valuable feedback and something you can use to improve rather than only a big blow and setback.
I’ve found that the simplest and most helpful way to do that is to ask myself better questions (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 adjust my course to avoid this trap/making the same mistake and likely do 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 rush and while some of the answers may be immediate others might take an hour, day or even a week to pop up.
The important thing is to start thinking about the situation from this perspective and to be constructive about things instead of getting stuck in denial or negativity and apathy.
Every attempt is about learning.
When you fail, that’s actually really good information. Before you failed, you thought that something would work (a prediction), but then real-world information came in that told you it didn’t work.
That means you now know something you didn’t know before. That’s excellent. Now you can adjust your plan, figure something new out, try a new method. Keep learning.
Embrace Your limitations.
We are all messy, imperfect people. Some of us have health issues to contend with or other difficult circumstances in our life that are part of our honest reality at the moment. We have personality quirks, we carry baggage from our pasts, we are all works in progress.
Making peace with, or embracing our limitations does not mean complacency or disengaging. But it might mean surrender to what is in the moment.
Some of our limitations might be things we work at overcoming while others are simply out of our control. Making peace with this can go a long way to helping us live with peace and joy even in the middle of the storm.
I no longer actually think of “failure” as a dirty word. I am, we all are, a mixed bag of strength and struggle; this is part of our incredible story as imperfect but beautiful created beings.
Remind Yourself of Your Past Successes…
Failing doesn’t mean that you’re worthless, or that you’ll never achieve the things you want. Think of all the times in the past when you’ve succeeded.
Maybe you got a promotion that you worked for last year, or you had a great GPA in college, or you lost weight, or you learned to play a musical instrument. You might want to write down a list of successes – things that you’ve accomplished over the past few years, whether big or small. If you ever lack confidence, you can go back and read over that list.
…And Your Past Failures
Your past successes are important … but so are your past failures. You’ve made mistakes before, and you’ve survived them. Perhaps you did badly in an exam, or screwed something up at work, or lost your temper and had to apologize.
It’s not fun to think about the times when things went wrong, but by acknowledging your failures, you can remind yourself that today is no different. Just as you recovered in the past, you can recover from your recent failure too.
Explore Expand Adapt and Keep On Going
Learning has no age and no end either. You need to keep exploring the opportunities that will help you to be successful. Knowledge is power – change your life with knowledge and experience.
Keep finding new ways and be innovative in your approach. Remember that successful people are not different but they do things differently.
If you need to learn new skills to secure your chances of being successful then go ahead and learn them, even if it requires you to join some course or attend workshops.
There’s no better guide to being successful than your competitors and the one’s who’re on the top – “If they can do it, you too can.”
You don’t only have to adopt this motto, but get on to observing and analyzing them. Find out what they did, which you didn’t – to be successful.
It’s not necessary that what works for others will work for you, but you’ll surely get the basics right, and you can configure the details yourself thereafter.
How easy it is to solve a problem when you have a solved example of a similar problem before you – isn’t it?
In the same way, you’ve successful people before you who’ve most probably been on the same path as you. Treat them as the solved examples and solve your problems by learning from them.
Explore your inner self and the outer environment. Help yourself with all the information and tools that you find, which will help you craft your way to success.
You can create your life options for success. It’ll help you overcome the obstacles in life and achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself.
These are your keys to success that you can use anytime and anywhere. They’re ALWAYS in your hands.
Remind yourself: anyone who wants to do things of value in life will fail.
We often mostly just hear about people’s successes. But the path to those milestones tends to have many setbacks. The story of someone’s success may seem only bright and fast-moving in what’s told in the media or we see in our minds.
But the reality – and the useful way to approach setbacks – is most often more like this quote by Michael Jordan:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 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 in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Take time to recover and start over
Failure shouldn’t stop you from trying out something new. It makes you stronger and better prepared for new projects. Yes, failure is undesirable.Yes, failing is never what we plan for when we pursue a goal.
However, more than likely, you will recover from failure. Once you’ve recovered, you are better equipped to chase after more dreams, more secure in knowing that you’ve survived a failure.
Challenge the Voice of Your Inner Critic.
You do not have to listen helplessly as that inner critic of yours rips you to shreds. Not everything you hear is true or helpful. Talk back. Stand up for yourself like you’d stand up for your best friend.
So what if there is some truth mingled in with the lies – remember that we are all imperfect, we have all failed in some ways – that does not mean you have to sit there and receive a beating. Stop letting hypothetical stories play out in your brain – you have the power to control your thoughts. You can learn to shift your thoughts and break the cycle of damaging behavior that is borne of those thoughts (getting help to learn this can be life-changing).
Seek advice from trusted others.
Instead of feeling that you must go it alone, talk with others you trust and get their input. You may have a blind spot as to certain aspects of your character or be unable to see clearly what you did that resulted in failure. Friends, loved ones, family members, co-workers and others whose counsel you value will offer encouragement and support that can help you get through this rough time.
Accept how you feel.
When you’ve just failed it will most likely hurt. Sometimes a bit. Sometimes a lot.
That’s OK. Don’t try to push it away by distracting yourself or by trying to push the responsibility onto the rest of the world (if you deep down know that this one’s on you partly or fully). And don’t try to paint it over with a smile.
I’ve found that it works better to not let yourself be lead away by those options or impulses.
But to just be with what I’m thinking and feeling. To try to accept it, to let it in and to hurt for a while instead of trying to reject it all and to keep it away.
Because when you let it in and accept it then it will go faster and in the long run be less painful to process what has happened.
If you reject how you really feel then those emotions will pop up at unexpected times later on and can make you moody, pessimistic, angry or sad.
Practice Noticing Your Wins.
A simple but powerful exercise I practice each night is the 3/2/1 exercise. Give it two weeks and notice the shift it can make in the way you feel about yourself. Before sleep, as you lay in bed, take a few deep, slow breaths, noticing the rise and fall of your lower belly. Ask yourself:
what are 3 things I am grateful for today? What are 2 things I did well today (this part is hard for so many women and I encourage you to take the time needed to identify your “wins”)? What is 1 thing I would do differently next time? This last step is about growth not criticism.
Always remember: you have more than one shot to create the life you want.
You will screw up at some point in life, and that’s okay so long as you learn from them and figure out a different path towards the same goal.
The biggest screw up you can make is to just give up and accept that you can’t succeed because of you who you are or where you come from. If you are going through hell, don’t stop. And if you catch hell, don’t hold it.
So start again when you get it wrong. People who overestimate what they’re capable of are far more likely to actually, get off their ass and try.
You will stumble, you may fail, but you are not your failure!
One thing is absolutely certain, if you REALLY want to succeed in life, if you want to do something special, something incredible, if you want to fulfill your dreams… failure is inevitable.
Make the necessary change to achieve your goals.
The solution may not require you to change yourself or your ways completely. But you need to do that in some ways, and you’ve to make efforts to know exactly in what ways.
You need to analyze the problem and your strategy. Try to use your logic and common sense to find a pattern of failure, if there’s any.
Spot out your bad habits that might be one of the causes of your downfall or failure. Make an effort to change your habits and adopt the good habits required to be successful.
You need to be dedicated, highly motivated and determined, besides being courageous and self-confident. If these qualities aren’t there or fully developed in you till now, then work on them.
Of course, you also might need to change your attitude – that makes a hell of a difference. You might need to change the ways of how you react to certain situations or things to be successful.
Changing your ways, methods or strategies might solve your problem. You need to be optimistic and keep trying out new things.
Change yourself to make yourself competent. If there are certain criterions of success that can be improved upon in order to be successful and to rise up, then you need to explore and learn them.
Though you fall, you are not a failure. Pick yourself back up
