This topic is something that comes up all the time. Why isn’t this working for me I feel like such a failure? Failure is a temporary inevitable situation when you taking a risk or learning a new skill. Think about it, when you first learned to drive a car no one expected you to do it perfectly the first time you sat behind a wheel. In fact, you didn’t’ expect to be perfect either. Why is it we have become so hard on ourselves now?
So what has happened along the way that we believe we cannot fail or if we do it’s the end of the road. We have become a society obsessed with perfectionism and with instant gratification and over complicating situations. Fear of failure is rampant. There are entire books, websites, and programs designed around those three little words “fear of failure”. You’re afraid to make mistake, or are so easily overwhelmed when they happen you become afraid to take risks.
As a result as a business owner you consistently procrastinate focus on all the negative possibilities and no matter how farfetched the possibilities you believe the worse will surely happen in this situation. Or maybe you lack commitment discipline or patience.
But think about it. The not so popular idea of failure also has a positive side. Failure presents new opportunities and perspectives you may not have considered before. It teaches the value of hard work. The truth is if it were easy it wouldn’t be fun and you’d have no sense of accomplishment. The learning and the fun is in the journey. If that weren’t true most millionaires would stop after making their millions but instead most become more inspired and creative because they are searching for the next journey in their life. It make life more interesting and challenging and adds clarity to your decisions.
When you are failing here are a few things to avoid.
1. Spending time blaming yourself
2. Spending time trying to avoid failure (this one won’t work anyway)
3. Dwelling you past mistakes
4. Making excuse
5. Unnecessary stressing or worrying
6. Seeing failure as the end
7. Spending time blaming yourself or others
8. Seeing failure as the end
So what do you do when you’re staring in the face of failure. Immediately look for the opportunity. Spend some time learning from the experience. Acknowledge and take ownership and vie yourself a pep talk and some positive encouraging words.
Presumably you want to not feel like a failure, so rather than looking at what hasn’t gone as planned learn from your experience by asking “what can I learn from this? What could I have done differently? Where do I need to improve, What knowledge am I lacking, and What is good about this”.
On the surface this seems pretty simple maybe overly simplified, but as I mentioned earlier we tend to over complicate situation and look for hard answers when the easy ones are standing right in front of us.
Celebrate failure it can be the beginning of something great. Failing forward is an invaluable tool for your success. Where do you see yourself five years from now? Failing forward I hope.