How To Deal with Failure How To Deal with Failure

If you never experience failure, the truth is, you’re not trying hard enough. Falling short of your goal is part of life. Pushing boundaries, trying new things, getting out of your comfort zone all carry a risk of failure. No matter how much you plan, you might fail, but the truth is, this is what makes life good.

• It’s OK to Have Feelings - It’s natural to get upset and feel bad about failing. You should experience all your feelings about it without stuffing them down. If you don’t have the feelings, it’ll be hard to learn from the experience. Feeling bad is a good sign that you are a real person with empathy and kindness inside. Not only that, but these feelings can also motivate you toward taking smart actions that reduce the impact of your failure and reduce your chances of repeating the same mistakes later.

• Know What’s in Your Control - As you feel your feelings, it’s also important to understand what about the situation is within your control. While you can’t control everything, you can create a list of everything that went wrong and assign the places where you had control and the places you didn’t.

• Accept Personal Responsibility - Once you have a list of actions, you can accept your own personal responsibility for the failure but only where you really have control. There is no way to control others’ choices, but you can control yourself. Find the places in your process from goal making to impact where you can accept responsibility and make it right if needed.

• Learn from Your Mistakes - Evaluate how you could have acted to change the previous outcome. You may find that you could have simply set realistic goals or by being more action-oriented each day. Whatever it is, find out what the mistake was, note it, and define how you’d act if this happened again.

• Plan How You’d Act Differently Now - Once you note how you could have done something differently, plan out how you’d act differently now. You may be able to give it another shot or simply plan what you’d do differently in a similar situation.

When possible, reframe the experience as “learning” so you can reduce the risk of failure in the future. Hindsight is always 20/20. Learn from your mistakes and when you’re ready to try again, you’ll be smarter and better prepared