Failure Breeds Success: 10 Things to Consider When Failing
Are you as tenacious as Michael Jordan? Most people wouldn’t believe that a man often lauded as the best basketball player of all time was actually cut from his high school basketball team. Luckily, Jordan didn’t let this setback stop him from playing the game and he has stated, “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
We have all failed in our lives at one time or another. When looking back at those failures, we usually tend to remember the good that came from it, or a valuable life lesson rather than the failure itself. Failure is an important part of success, so when going through failure, stay calm and look for the gift in the experience. We’ve put together 10 things to keep in mind while you are failing.
1. Expect mistakes. Life’s hard knocks are as common as life’s success knocks. 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.
2. Remind yourself that you are good enough. 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 error 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Focus on trying again. Overnight successes are rare; they are usually people who have been trying and failing and trying again many times over. 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.
10. Grow. 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.
To read our free eBook on Turning Failure Into Success click here. It’s a short easy to read guide that gives you more detailed information and provides links to online resources.
At TheHomeMag, we are always looking for different ways to help you grow your business.
Happy Marketing!
–Erwin Dass, Marketing Director
Please call 949.478.5991 if you have any questions.