PRODUCTIVE LIFE COACHING: FAILURE

By Zainub Jada
07:02:2022

EVERY FAILURE IS A STEP TO SUCCESS

Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts. (Winston Churchill)

DEFINITION OF FAILURE

• Failure is the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success.
• Lack of success or the inability to meet an expectation.

THE IMPORTANCE OF FAILURE

“If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived”, is how the saying goes.

Failure is probably one of the aspects of life most people are afraid of. But the truth is everyone has failed and anyone can fail again. We sometimes forget that all successful people have failed, but they did not stop after their failures. They stood up and tried again, time after time. We tend to think that people who are successful were just lucky, it just fell into their laps or they just had the right connections.

So do not be afraid of failure, it is a part of your road to success.

Learn from it

In order to grow, you need failure; it is life’s ultimate lesson. Failing will happen, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, so you might as well have a ‘no fear’ attitude towards it. This does not mean you should expect to fail, but when it happens, accept it.

There is value in failure. Through failure, you will get to know yourself better, and you will learn from your mistakes. Failures make us rethink, reconsider, and find new ways and strategies to achieve our goals.

Stop fearing it

In order to reach your ultimate potential, your personal best, and to make the ‘impossible’ possible, you need to push yourself, go to the absolute limits, and definitely not fear failure. When you have a no-fear attitude and embrace failure it will maximize your motivation, determination, and perseverance.

Let go of your ego

No one wants to fail, because it is bad for our ego. Failure humbles you and will make you evaluate the situation better. When your ego is in charge, you will not learn from the mistakes you have made, you will not be open to other people’s views or see the situations clearly.

We need to learn, evaluate, and listen to other people if we want to see what needs to change in order to succeed. Your ego always wants to be right and will get in the way of you and your success. In order to be successful, we have to accept that we were wrong, evaluate, learn, and move on.

Boost your mood and get back up again

There are two types of people in this world, people who take failure personally, see it as a permanent situation and give up, and there are people who use it as a lesson, do not take it personally but see it as a temporary setback.

We all feel an emotional low after we have failed, that is natural, human, and inevitable. But how we respond to our failures is what determines our road to success.

TYPES OF FAILURES

Preventable failures

These could have been foreseen, but weren’t. This is the worst kind of failure, and it usually occurs because an entrepreneur didn’t follow best practices, didn’t have the right talent, or didn’t pay attention to detail. If you’ve experienced a preventable failure, it’s time to more deeply analyze the effort’s weaknesses and stick to what works in future ventures.

Unavoidable failures

These often happen in complex situations and involve unique sets of factors. This is the type of failure currently dogging energy firms, beset by an oil price collapse that almost no one saw coming. The lesson from this type of failure is to create systems to try to spot small failures resulting from complex factors and take corrective action before it snowballs and destroys the company.

Intelligent failures

These are the best kind. They happen fast and don’t consume too many resources. This kind provides the most useful information for the least cost. This is the philosophy behind the trial-and-error approach, in which a business conducts experiments to find a product or business model that works. The lesson here is clear: If something works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, go back to the drawing board.

REASONS WHY WE FAIL

As any successful person will honestly admit, failure happens, and we’ve all had our fair share of it. But from each failure, we learn two equally valuable lessons. One, that there was at least one reason we failed; and two, that we can rebound from that failure.

Lack of Persistence

More people fail not because they lack knowledge or talent, but because they just quit. It’s important to remember two words: persistence and resistance. Persist in what must be done and resist what ought not to be done.

Try new approaches. Persistence is important, but repeating the same actions over and over again, hoping that this time you’ll succeed, probably won’t get you any closer to your objective. Look at your previous unsuccessful efforts and decide what to change. Keep making adjustments and mid-course corrections, using your experience as a guide.

Lack of Conviction

People who lack conviction take the middle of the road. But what happens in the middle of the road? You get run over. People without conviction go along to get along because they lack confidence and courage. They conform in order to get accepted, even when they know that what they are doing is wrong.

Decide what is important to you. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right and doing well. Let your passion show even in mundane tasks. It’s OK to collaborate and cooperate for success, but it’s not OK to compromise your values—ever.

Rationalisation

Winners might analyze, but they never rationalize. Losers rationalize and have a book full of excuses to tell you why they couldn’t succeed.

Change your perspective. Don’t think of every unsuccessful attempt as a failure. Few people succeed at everything the first time. Most of us attain our goals only through repeated effort. Do your best to learn everything you can about what happened and why.

Dismissal of Past Mistakes

Some people live and learn, and some only live. Failure is a teacher if we have the right attitude. Wise people learn from their mistakes, while experience is the name they give to slip-ups.

Define the problem better. Analyze the situation, what you want to achieve, what your strategy is, why it didn’t work. Are you really viewing the problem correctly?

Lack of Discipline

Anyone who has accomplished anything worthwhile has never done it without discipline. Discipline takes self-control, sacrifice and avoiding distractions and temptations. It means staying focused.

Don’t be a perfectionist. You might have an idealized vision of what success will look and feel like. Although that can be motivational, it might not be realistic. Succeeding at one goal won’t eliminate all your problems. Be clear on what will satisfy your objectives, and don’t obsess about superficial details.

Poor Self-Esteem

Poor self-esteem is a lack of self-respect and self-worth. People with low self-confidence are constantly trying to find themselves rather than creating the person they want to be.

Don’t label yourself. You might have failed, but you’re not a failure until you stop trying. Think of yourself as someone still striving toward a goal, and you’ll be better able to maintain your patience and perseverance for the long haul.

HOW TO BOUNCE BACK FROM FAILURE

Take responsibility for the missed opportunity.

Be prepared for the letdowns that happen every so often. Know that this lost opportunity just set you up to take advantage of the next one. Realize that you can make the necessary alterations next time. Make the changes that will make the difference. Study your mistakes and learn from them. Instead of dwelling on the mistakes, simply acknowledge them and learn from them.

Remind yourself that you’re bound to get better.

Don’t get down on yourself. Don’t beat yourself up. It’s the next opportunity that matters, not the previous one. The previous one matters only in that you must learn from your mistakes. But the next one gives you the opportunity to show that you have learned from your mistakes. You can do it better next time. You just have to practice. Keep trying. If you figured out what went wrong last time, then you know how to make it right next time. Don’t beat yourself up for messing up. Pat yourself on the back for figuring it out.

You need to encourage yourself. You need to pump yourself up. Why? Because you can’t wait and hope that someone else will come along and cheer you up, make you feel better, tell you that you’ll do better next time. You have to rely on yourself. You have to have faith in yourself and your ability to figure out what works and what doesn’t. You have to have the inner belief that everything you’re doing you’re doing for a positive outcome in the future. You have to encourage yourself with future successes.

When you miss an opportunity or suffer a setback while realizing your goals, you need to encourage yourself by immediately getting back in line. If you fall off track, get right back on. If you fall away from your disciplines, get right back to them. If you fall out of habit, get back into it. Something goes wrong, do what you can to make it right. It might be hard. It might be scary. Keep your resolve alive, active and well. Cheer yourself on to victory. You can do it.

Accept an appropriate level of responsibility

It’s important to accept an accurate level of responsibility for your failure. Taking on too much may cause you to unnecessarily blame yourself. On the other hand, blaming other people or unfortunate circumstances on your failure will prevent you from learning from it.

When you think about your failure, look for explanations, not excuses. Identify the reasons you failed and acknowledge what you can do differently next time.

Create a Plan for Moving Forward

Once you’ve identified your mistakes and where you can learn from them, you’ll be ready to make a plan for moving forward. Remember that dwelling on your problems or rehashing your mistakes will keep you stuck. Stop thinking, “I am a failure,” and focus on thinking, “I am capable of trying again.”

With your new learnings, think about what you’ll do differently next time. Create a plan that will help you put the information you gained into practice.

THE POSITIVE BENEFITS OF FAILURE

One of the strongest indicators of how failure impacts a person long-term is how they respond right after it takes place. Do they own the failure?

In other words, when we respond by saying, “I’m so sorry. I made a mistake. This was my fault. I see where things went wrong,” that sort of thing, failure acts like one of life’s best teachers. We learn from our mistakes and move on.

When we try to pass the buck, when we make excuses for ourselves, blame other people, or try to avoid the natural consequences of our actions, the results are the opposite. Our failure snowballs into more failure.

We can only receive what failure has to teach us if we’re willing to fully embrace the failure itself. When you’re willing to accept the fact that failure occurred, you also get the positive lessons failure teaches.

Failure teaches you to embrace your emotions. Failure is accompanied by a variety of emotions: embarrassment, anxiety, anger, sadness, and shame, to name a few. Those feelings are uncomfortable, and many people will do anything they can to escape feeling emotional discomfort.

Allowing yourself to feel bad is motivating. It can help you work harder to find better solutions so that you’ll improve next time.

So, go ahead and embrace your emotions. Acknowledge how you’re feeling and let yourself feel bad for a bit.

Failure teaches us that success rarely comes in the form of a “big break”.  More often than not it comes after months, even years, of hard work.

Failure teaches to try many avenues before giving up on reaching a goal because usually, there is more than one way to get there.

Failure teaches us not to trust everyone and anyone who says they are out to help us. It teaches us to trust that gut feeling, the intuitive sense inside us.

Failure teaches you to identify that gap and address it. Treat failure as lessons that guide you to where you want to be. Learn from your own failures or from the failures of others. Even though at times going through your own failures will leave a greater impact, it can be unnecessary if you already know that’s the wrong move to do.

Failure trains you to be stronger. We put in hard work and effort every single day in hopes to achieve the outcome we will it to be. However, there will be times when things just do not go your way. So, from that point, what do you do? Do you give up or pick yourself up? Going through failures helps you to learn how to manage your emotions and realign your focus. Feeling disappointed is a given, but by having failures as breakfast, you will be less likely to dwell on failures but to pick up the lessons and move on better.

Failure keeps you grounded and humble. Imagine a life with no failures, the world we live in is so perfect that we might lose the drive to improve ourselves or seek knowledge. Failure is here to remind us that no one is perfect and there is so much to know in this world. Stay humble and hungry for improvements and commit yourself to lifelong learning.

Some failures are bigger than others. Some are more public than others, some are more humiliating, and some have a greater stigma around them. But learn to own your failures, admit them and even embrace them. You’re much more likely to get the results you want.

IN A NUTSHELL

Failure is a great teacher.

It can be a valuable lesson for us in the long run. We should be able to own it, examine it and take important lessons away from it.

Failure is inevitable. It isn’t a signal to give up. Rather, failure is just an opportunity in a somewhat different dress than you are probably used to. It’s an opportunity to learn, correct mistakes and grow in life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. careergirldaily.com
2. kingfisherintl.com
3. nosidebar.com
4. betterup.com
5. success.com
6. verywellmind.com