Dealing with Failure

The generation nowadays is getting slightly out of hand when it comes to dealing with failures, rejection, and stress. Overall, whichever the result could be, it roots back when the person felt failing. When the hardest blow of failure suddenly hit a person and the inability to overcome such may lead to a more serious case such as depression, indifference, or suicide. What is worst is that the society we live in now contributes to a cumulative effect of an individual’s growth and personal outlook. Ultimately, it affects the individual’s self-esteem and may go all the way down to a spiral end of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There are a lot of things a person could do in overcoming failure and we can trim it down into 5. However, it doesn’t mean that these are already the best ways to do this. It will be a constant trial and error with the intervention until you achieve the desired results. One can simply not work for everything and you just need to be flexible in changing the approach whenever you feel like to.

Acceptance

Everything gets better when you start accepting the fact that it already happened. Accepting is the first step in everything that needs healing and it every burden there is to be felt becomes lighter and easier to solve. When you accept your failures, it means you are bigger than your ego and that you are admitting your weaknesses and that you are not a perfect human being. Acceptance is to retreat from the thought and constant struggle of the ‘what could have been’ and all other regrets your failure could bring you. Majority of the people still think that it is one of the most difficult things to do and truth to be told, acceptance of a failure whole-heartedly won’t make us lesser than ourselves.

Learning

Learning from own failures will be one of the best teachers one can have, however, if one does not learn from it, everything becomes useless and this may just lead to repeating the same old mistakes all over again. Learning starts when you do something different from your usual ways or simply changing the approach in order to get a different result. As a famous scientist said, if you keep on doing what you usually do, you will just get what you usually get.” While there is truth in the saying, “practice makes perfect”, there is also a truth in “practicing the same old things become permanent”. Learning takes place if there is change and it doesn’t only mean that you have to learn new things, you can always re-learn old things. However, I am sure that this is something we did not see that is important as well – we have to also unlearn both old and present things that we know. Accepting the fact that we have to let go not just our ego but also our old learnings is quite impossible to do especially if we already have been accustomed to it. Yet, we need to accept that as long as we do not unlearn the things that contributed to the failure, there will be no space left for some new things to do. One must unlearn in order to learn and continuously re-learn.

Baby Steps

It is okay to start again. Failing is a reminder that we can have another shot in taking chances in life – maybe this time, making things right and well. It is never wrong to start again and try to make it right. Nothing is too late unless acted upon. We can never have it easy the second time around, sometimes, it becomes more difficult if things are to be done again. A lot has to consider whenever we take baby steps again. It considers the cost of everything we had lost – and that includes time and resources – and of course, our attitude of Grit. Grit is what we have that makes us not just resilient over the failures but also making sure we finish strong. Resiliency alone won’t take us far, it will just make us stand or bounce back from any setback, however, Grit takes us farther apart from people who just settle in just standing back up again. Taking baby steps makes you consider the possibilities of failing again and we have to be definite of our final actions from the failure.

Plan Out

Planning out is the first step to take after we decide to stand up and take those baby steps again. Planning out doesn’t scratch off everything that happened in the failure but really thinking of what went wrong the first time around so that we could finally see what else could be done next. Planning must have the end goal in mind and it should remind us why we even started. Never limit and never box the imagination when thinking of plans. Always set out of the course and try to see on different angles and perspective. It is also best to take note of every aspect that contributes to the failure and what could we do to turn things around. Planning sets you to a lot of phases and steps but make sure you cover everything there is to check and control. Plan out the things we could do if we are to redo everything.

Take Action

Planning out is only good when executed well. Most of the great plans fail because they were not done as it was planned out. Planning must cover the different scenarios and possibilities that we could take action of by the time we take to do everything again. Just to be clear, a complete redo of our steps after a failure doesn’t mean we redo also the factors that made us fail. It is taking action to those gaps so that we avoid a repetition of mistakes.

Overcoming failure is difficult than it sounds and it doesn’t give you an easy way out. The mere fact that we have that opportunity to think and re-think all our steps is a great privilege of the scarce time thus, we must never waste it.

Do you have any past failures that you want to redo and overcome this time around? On my end, there’s a bit of a secret to how to stay standing up amidst adversity – that’s to find a solid rock build your foundation with. I build mine with Jesus.

“He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress where I will never be shaken.” Psalms‬ ‭62:2‬ ‭NLT‬

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