How to Fail (well)

Failure comes in many severities. Big or small, they usually come with some disappointment. What happens next is critical. While it’s important to digest our failure, it’s just as important to then ask where do I go from here? Success in achieving challenging goals is difficult. You may have to try again, and again. Getting back on our feet can feel hard but we must press on. Here are some strategies for turning a failure into a learning experience:

Forgive

Forgive yourself as well as the outside factors that led to your failure. There are factors entirely out of our control that can barge into our plan and throw us off track. These are difficult to plan for and challenging to respond strategically to in the moment. We can assume that these things will happen on an infrequent basis, potentially ending or putting our path towards a goal on hold. Being ready to adapt to these variables will help us weather a storm. Afterwards we can assess the damage. How far off course are we? Will these alter time specific goals?

Holding onto bitterness about the failure will distract you from moving forward productively. Recognize that failures happen all of the time, to everyone, in many ways. It takes many factors to succeed.

Reflect

The purpose of this is to reframe your failure into an experience that you can look back upon knowing you learned something worthwhile. Judge yourself, everyone, and all events fairly when examining your failure. Being dishonest with yourself about what really happened will cloud your understanding of where things went wrong.

Step back and review like a movie scene what happened. Recall details about everything that happened.

How do you feel about it?

What would have helped you?

We’re there factors like people, places, and things that affected the outcome?

Make note of these things, they will be helpful later.

Proceed

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

If you survived the situation, then you have the ability to get back up and move forward. Start with a focused mindset as you rise up from this fallback, you will need it to get back on your feet.

Should you focus back on the same goal getting a new path to it, or choose a new goal entirely. There is no wrong answer here. Some things are worth going back for and trying again, while other times it makes sense to move on. Whatever the case, take what you thought about when reflecting on your failure, and decide how you will proceed with a new mindset that makes you more effective at achieving your next goal.

Armed with lessons from your past you will recover from this setback more experienced with a finely tuned outlook. Use this to recognize when these similar shortcoming are arising and catch them early. If you ignore things you already know, you are very likely to end up failing the same way again. Let’s try not to make the same mistake twice.