Learning to deal with failure can be a difficult battle. At the core, most people experience a deep desire to be successful at something at some point in their lives. Some people have big aspirations to follow their dreams in their career, while others might view success as building a happy family (and an infinite number of other possibilities). Either way, many things in an individual’s life will not always go as planned. Often times, this can be due to personal shortcomings. However, with a persevering spirit, failure can actually turn out to be a good thing. When you practice identifying failure not as a purely negative aspect of life, but as life lessons that allow you to grow, you are taking the first step in self-improvement in order to inch one step closer to achieving the success you seek.
Sometimes, human nature causes people to dwell on these personal shortcomings and even negativity in general. There are times where even if an individual were to have 100 successes in one day and just one “failure”, that the individual will dwell on the one failure as opposed to the many things that they did right on that given day. It is important to recognize that most successes are actually the result of past failures. The idea is not to try to completely forget about past failures either. Pain on any level is best dealt with, rather than pushed to the side, as dealing with pain in the moment is the quickest path to recovery. Grieving one’s failures is a perfectly natural response, but it is also important to think critically about those failures and to ask one’s self questions about said failures. What could have been done better? What aspects of whatever the situation may be were not fully considered? What can be learned from this? When an individual asks themselves the right questions, the answers will come over time in the form of wisdom.
Maybe you failed to perform a task that was expected you, or the task was performed, but not at the level of excellence that was expected. It could be that you said something hurtful to a loved one or wronged somebody in a way that they shouldn’t have been wronged. Either way, it is important to remember that all humans are fallible, including yourself. Mistakes are not only occasions that may happen every now and then; they are to be expected. Keeping in mind that mistakes are to be expected, learning how to best deal with these mistakes is vital to a healthy life and allows human beings to grow.
