Everyone – great or small – experiences failure. No one is an exception. This feeling can be sad, painful and even shameful, depending on the kind of failure experienced.
Read more about How-To
Sometimes, we do not envision
failing, but on the other hand, our misdeeds or miscalculations can lead to our failure. Sometimes, we even plan to fail when we fail to plan. No matter what the situation may seem, whether we orchestrated our failure or not, the feeling can leave us miserable.
If we do not deal with it in an appropriate manner, it might affect our
mental health. In this article, I highlight 7 habits to overcoming failure.
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Go Through Your Feeling
When you’re faced with failure, don’t subdue your feelings of disappointment and pain. Cry, if you feel like it. Go through the pain by expressing the way you feel. Don’t distract yourself with temporal pleasure substances or related things like alcohol and drugs. Don’t bottle up your pains. Don’t brush it off with a feigned smile. If you do, the feeling might pop up unexpectedly and make you moody, angry, bitter and sad. So, the first step to overcoming failure is to let yourself go through the pains of failure. You can cry. Yeah. Cry if you feel like it. But don’t bottle up your pains.
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You Failed Doesn’t Mean You’re A Failure
Everyone fails at one thing or the other. Failure is a painful part of life that everyone has experienced, but how we deal with it matters a lot. A setback shouldn’t define you. Don’t define yourself as a failure because you’re going through a setback. It’s an event, not a life sentence. Don’t make it seem you’re destined to fail. Take your life into your hands and look at how best to deal with it. You fail today, you win tomorrow. Life is like a rollercoaster.
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Go Back To Drawing Board
People fail collectively and individually. As a collective, companies, schools, clubs, teams, etc experience failure at one point in time or the other – whether in failing to win a prize or clinching a contract or hitting some set of goals. One of the habits in overcoming failure is to go back to the drawing board to understand what went wrong. Where did we not get it right? As a football team, maybe ill-preparation might be the reason why you did poorly. When facing failure fathom out the factors responsible and address them. If it means hiring the best hands as a businessperson, you act on that immediately. Failures are feedbacks.
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Always Remind Yourself That Failing Is The Price You Pay For Greatness
Winston Churchill, wartime prime minister of Britain, says ”Success is moving from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Many successful inventions we celebrate today were products of serial failures that gave rise to success. Thomas Edison tried 1,000 times unsuccessfully to invent the lightbulb. His has been quoted often that he knows 1,000 things that won’t work. To hit a milestone you must hit many stumbling blocks.
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Talk About It
Talk about it rather than suck about it. Most often the reason why you’re failing serially is that you haven’t shared failure stories. Talking to someone you trust can lift up the burden off your heart. A conversation can shift your thought. Sometimes when you hold a conversation with successful people, you might learn from their failure stories and move on. Through conversations, you can vent your inner pain and gain back your peace of mind.
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Get Inspired By Others
You’re not the first to fail neither will you be the last. Millions have failed before you and have risen from their ashes of failure and shoot up to a high point of success. These people have gone ahead to share their stories of triumphs. Get their books, listen to their podcasts, watch their videos and follow their TV series or programme. For instance, the Steve Harvey Show is an amazing programme where Steve Harvey shares inspiring stories from his life.
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Be Willing To Start Again
Failure is not a life sentence; it’s an event that will surely pass. Get this at the back of your mind that you’ve failed and you can’t change that. No level of tears, anger and self-resentment can change that fact. But you can change the future narrative. Be willing to start again by learning from the factors that led to your past failure, get the right lessons, put in place the necessary safety nets and relaunch.
Conclusion
Don’t mull over failure when it’s not a life sentence. Be willing to learn from your mistakes. Be willing to get inspiration from your world and remember that failure gives you the needed experience to start all over, intelligently.
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This article was first published on 23rd August 2021
nnaemeka-emmanuel
Nnaemeka is an academic scholar with a degree in History and International Studies from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He is also a creative writer, content creator, storyteller, and social analyst.
Comments (1)
This is a great piece. concise and very useful. Thanks