Effective handling of failure

THE POWER OF FAILURE

How to handle failure?

CHALLA S.S.J.RAM PHANI
Empanelled Career Transition Coach and Trainer
ADECCO LHH
Certified Trainer and Facilitator
CARLTON ADVANCED MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE, USA

aimkaam : Creating Success for You!
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Failure is a given in life; expecting
to sail through without a hiccup is
unrealistic and sets you up to fall
harder when failure does happen.
Avoiding failure also prevents you
from focusing on gaining the
resiliency needed to cope with it, a
vital element of bouncing back.

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It is unfortunate that in societies obsessed with success and
achievement, failure can be made to feel like the worst thing
that could ever happen to a person. The reality is that failure
is commonplace but so is overcoming it and pushing through
to more successful endeavors in the future. Even where a
failure cannot be salvaged, there is always something to be
learned from it. In this article, you'll learn a little about how
to overcome failure through having the right attitude. When
you don't let the mishaps of life keep you down too long, then
nobody else will be able to keep you down too long either.

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Expect mistakes. Life's hard knocks are as common as life's
success knocks. To expect the process of living to always be
smooth sailing is to invite a lack of realism into your life. It
happens to the best of us. Failure helps to create balance in
your life and presents an opportunity for personal growth.
Accepting the inevitability that things won't always go your
way is an important part of avoiding becoming bitter and
twisted, or of preventing yourself from simply resting on your
laurels and never pushing further to realize your full
potential.

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Learn to love finding out that you're wrong about something.
That's not failure; it's enlightenment and the path to finding the
right way.

Read How to control perfectionism if this behavioral trait is
holding you back in life. Perfectionism causes us to fear failure
and to feel we're personally a failure when we're faced with it.
Seeking to always be perfect sows our own seeds of
disappointment. Trying and failing is a much better teacher of
what it means to be human than never trying and never
succeeding.

You are always good enough, in fact, you're better.

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Remind yourself that you are good enough. Leo
Babauta suggests that not believing we aregood
enough rests at the heart of fearing failure.
Failures serve as proof of this greatest
fear, causing us to want to withdraw and not try
again for fear of being further exposed as
inadequate and incapable. However, this fear is
not founded in reality; nobody is perfect and
everyone will err at various points in life.
The real difference between people who become successful and
overcome failure and those who do not comes down to how you
manage failure and how you view its impact on you. Feeling
inadequate is a commonplace human feeling that even very public,
very successful people feel but they don't let it keep them down. You
are good enough; all you need is to give yourself the go-ahead to
keep trying.
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Remain calm. Whatever you're feeling about a failure,
don't lose your composure over it. Look at it this way – it
won't make any difference to the outcome itself whether
you blow your top or stay calm but it will take a lot less
energy and maintain your reputation if you choose the
latter response. If you're really frustrated and angry,
channel these emotions to motivate you to start again.

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Don't take your anger out on others. It's not
good to bottle up feelings, but you can't go
around taking out your anger on those
around you for no good reason. Go for a run,
a swim, or a boxing session to relieve tension
and give you space to think. Just do
something focused and energized to distract
yourself from the initial intense feelings until
they calm.

Take your time. People don't usually recover
from a large failure overnight. It takes time
for the emotions to heal. That doesn't mean
you're entitled to mope though. This time is
better spent going over how to do it better
next time and building up your resilience.
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Don't obsess about what others are thinking; their criticism reflects
their own inadequacies.

Forget about how other people view you. Not only will any very
obvious failure soon be yesterday's news, but if you think other
people are judging you (and maybe they are, maybe they aren't), it
won't be long before they're too busy worrying about their own
failures to sling mud at yours.

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Allow each failure to serve as an opportunity to strengthen your
determination in the face of criticism. This is a far more positive
and self-sustaining response than giving in to believing the often
nasty and thoughtless things other people can say.

Choose balance, not unrealistic negativity or mindless optimism

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After all, everyone's going to fail now and
then; inflicting gloating on someone else has
a way of boomeranging right back, a reality
which serves as a natural form of tapering
off constant criticism. And ultimately, what's
it matter what the critics think?
Most of the time they haven't a clue what effort has gone into what
you've done and what you're trying to achieve – it's all too easy to
be an expert critic without being privy to the inside information.

Shift out of your head space. All of the negativity is in your head.
The reality is that you will recover. And the bonus is that you will
gain knowledge, insight, and experience – wisdom that only
those who tried something can lay claim to.

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Step outside of your personal negative sphere and reach out to the
people around you who care about you; enjoy their company and
learn about how other people cope with failures instead of simply
focusing on yourself.
Visualize each failure as a stepping stone to a stronger, more
resilient self. Treat each failure as a gift of learning what not to do
in the future.
Respect the humility that comes with failure. Too much success
can sometimes lead us astray and cause us to grow an
unwarranted sense of being infallible and feeling superior to
others. Failure can knock the stuffing out of such unrealistic self-
aggrandizement and help set you back on the right course.
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Worrying doesn't build solutions...
while humor enlightens.

Stop worrying, start laughing. Yes, the sun will come up again tomorrow. Yes,
things might be miserable for a little while but how will worrying help? Think
back to a time when you worried a lot. Did it make any difference? Most likely
not, apart from giving you more wrinkles and gray hair. The greatest thing you
can do for yourself during failure is to inject humor into your reflection of what
happened. While there will be a period in which you feel especially tender,
being able to laugh at yourself for mistakes can be an important part of the
healing process, readying you for moving on again. Being able to say "Oh I did
that, ha, ha, such a way to stuff up, ha, ha!" is part of putting failure into
perspective.
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Be very careful that you don't take on other people's
mistakes or circumstances as being your failure. Humor
is one way of telling you that you don't need to carry
the world on your shoulders and that sometimes, things
just happen, no matter what you do or do not do.
Write down what you've learned from the experience;
great for focus and review.
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Review what your failure has taught you. There are always things
to take away from a failure, to inform your future direction. It
might also be the case that you have made the failure seem worse
than it is; partial failure is also partial success and if you can draw
out what was successful and build on that, the sense of having
failed lessens. Sociologist Hugh Mackay believes that we don't
value failure in the way we ought to. Stating that failure is often
interpreted as a sign of personal inadequacy, he says that this
denies its vital role as part of the process of
maturation throughout life. In other words, the learning never
stops and the lessons include:
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Failure can help you discover your best
self. Failure is a signal that you're willing
to press on and discover new talents and
the edge of your existing ones; reaching
beyond what you know into what you
don't know.

Failure is about mastery. It's easy to flip
from one new thing to another and be a
Jack or Jill of many skills but a master or
mistress of none. It's much, much harder
to have the patience to master one thing
really well and to do it with precision and
exactitude. And to master something, one
must fail at it, a lot.

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Failure teaches you about will-power, persistence, self-discipline, and the value
of hard work. One of the signs of living in fear of failure is distraction. When you
allow distraction to overtake your life, you're comforted that your distractions
can hide your potential to fail. Ironically, distracting yourself is a failure in its own
right – a failure to take the time to keep trying, to continue toward perfecting
whatever you're learning to do or seeking to become. Ultimately, failure teaches
you the value of persistence and hard work.

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Stay in the present. Fear of failure is a future projection of worry and a reliance
on what happened in the past. If you're stuck in this kind of thinking, you're living
life according to what might happen. Author Leo Babauta suggests that the
response needed here is to"just do it, now, in the moment... bring yourself back in
the moment and focus on what you're doing right at this moment.“by remaining in
the present, you stay focused on the potential of now and allow
your creativity, smarts, and innovative drive to bloom. Past failures are
foundational lessons for better understandings in the present and an improved
sense of living now; the future is created through your commitment to the present
rather than your present being lead by your fear of tomorrow's possible losses.

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Embrace fear. Failure can only keep you down if you continue to
fear it. Embrace the fear and you release yourself from its
control. Allowing fear to control you renders you vulnerable to
being controlled. Unchecked fear can cause you to let others
make decisions for you in life; while that may be a recipe for not
taking responsibility when things go wrong, it can also mean you
lose your sense of creativity, innovation, and even your sense of
self. Help show people it's not only fine to fail but healthy to
break this fear!
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Ouch!
Allow yourself to fail on
purpose. Personal
development guru Steve
Pavlina recommends failing
on purpose. He suggests that
it is a good thing to set out to
do something that you know
will fail provided it won't
harm others or have long-
term negative consequences.

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He recommends learning something in
which you have no talent, trying
something beyond your skills set and
asking for something when you know
the answer will be no (such as a
raise, promotion, etc.).

From doing this, Steve believes that you'll experience
more benefits than losses, such as learning how to handle
failure, how to extract key issues, knowing your limits, and
unearthing the value of partial success.

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Keep trying; persistence does pay off
Focus on trying again. Dale Carnegie once
said that it was essential to "develop
success from failures. Discouragement and
failure are two of the surest stepping stones
to success." Persistence is the source of
success for the majority of people on this
planet. Overnight successes are rare; they
are usually people who have been trying
and failing and trying again many times
over. Successful ad man Siimon Reynolds
believes that lack of persistence is a major
reason as to why people fail; giving up too
soon means that you'll never know whether
what you're seeking to do or be was
achievable and he says that this is the case
for "the majority of people"

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Don't confuse lack of persistence with a
goal that's not possible to achieve; most
times it's the lack of persistence and not
the goal that's the problem.
Naturally, doing things the exact same
way that lead to failure is not the answer;
instead, focus on the goal and take the
lessons from what didn't work to show
you how you can find new, improved
Let’s be realistic, demand ways to reach your goal this time.
the impossible.

Better to die standing, than to live on your knees.
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Keep growing, all your life

Grow. Popular motivational coach
Anthony Robbins says that we
don't just grow for ourselves – we
grow so that we
can contribute well beyond
ourselves. This is an important
thing to remember when you're
proceeding through failures.

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Your experiences are available for
others to learn from if you're willing
to share them, as well as being willing
to share with others how you pushed
beyond failure into a more fruitful
and fulfilling outcome, and even what
happened when you couldn't
overcome the failure. This helps
everyone become more
understanding and accepting of the
role of failure in success-driven
societies.

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Defy those bumps and really live!
Ditch boredom and live large. Failure is the flipside
of success and without it, there could be no joy in
pushing through the odds, to know what success
truly feels like when achieved. At the end of the
day, it's a funny world where we're all longing for
everything to be simple and easy without any
bumps on the road; the sooner you realize that life
doesn't come with automatic smoothing agents, the
sooner you'll be happier about experiencing the
bumps. And just imagine how boring life would be if
you had nothing to improve or aim for! Keep in
mind that the feeling of failure is the feeling of
being alive. It's a sign you've given things a go,
pushed boundaries, and bounced back.
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Effective handling of failure

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