You’re not a failure just because you had a setback!!

Failure is difficult for anyone. But just because you failed in the past doesn’t mean you’re doomed in the present. The lessons you’ve learned from your epic fail can help you attain bigger wins today. Nothing can stop you from turning your failure into a massive win.

Often times things go OK or even better than that. But on some days they don’t. You make a mistake, have a setback or you simply fail. So what’s needed is a smart and self-kind way to handle such situations instead of letting them lead to vicious self-beatings and to them dragging you down into negativity for the day or month.

The first thing to do is to just accept how you feel. When you’ve just failed it will most likely hurt. Sometimes a bit. Sometimes a lot. That’s OK. Remember that it works better to not let yourself be lead away by those options or impulses. Try to accept it and let it in 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 go through all negative emotions.

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. But don’t fall for such a destructive 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. Try to 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.

Another powerful way to handle the emotional fallout and the thoughts that come from a failure is to not keep it all bottled up inside. Instead, let it out into the light by talking it over with someone close to you. By venting about it while the other person just listens you can sort things out for yourself, help yourself to accept what happened instead of pushing it away, and release that inner pressure.

By having a conversation about the situation you can see it from another perspective and through someone else’s eyes. A conversation with someone close to you can be very helpful. Another thing you can do is to learn from those who’ve gone where you want to go.

Failure is your greatest teacher. You can learn so much about yourself, an idea, or anything you’re working on by knowing what doesn’t work. But for a moment, let’s remember that mistakes aren’t necessarily a failure. One way to approach failure is to call everything you do an experiment. Approach your ideas and projects like a scientist trying to discover the truth.

With failure, you realize you move one step closer in the right direction. You think to yourself, “Okay, so this didn’t work. What will?” If you don’t know why you failed, you need to go back to being a scientist and investigate. All you’re doing is creating a new hypothesis to find out what really works.

Failure humbles you. When you feel like you’re on top of the world and that you can never come down, failure comes around and kicks you down. And there you go tumbling back down to reality. About half of success comes from just showing up. But when you get to the top, the competition is fiercer than anything you can imagine. So, it’s a constant battle to get to that top spot. You can be great. But being the best is a whole other ball game. Everyone at the top eventually comes back down.

Failure never seems like a pleasant experience. But it’s what makes the ride of life worthwhile. The climb to the top is difficult and slow. But it’s the climb up to where you get your greatest workout.

Michael Jordan quotes, “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”

-Kashish