A healthier and more accurate mindset around failure starts with a different view of failure. If you can view failure in a positive light, your fear of it will dissipate. You might even learn to like it! Think of how much your behavior would change if you viewed failure in a positive light.
Learn to enjoy failure with these strategies and success will become a certainty:
- Fail quickly. Most people spend too much time thinking and planning. The sooner you get started and begin failing, the sooner you’ll receive an education from the world. You’ll also succeed sooner. So get out there and begin failing as soon as possible.
- Avoid identifying with failure. Failing only means that your approach didn’t work. It doesn’t mean that YOU are a failure. There’s no reason to take failure personally. It has nothing to do with you as a person. If one approach didn’t work, try another.
- Failure is the most accurate feedback you can get. Your belief on whether or not something will work is just an opinion, a guess. The same can be said regarding the advice and opinions of others. The only 100% accurate answer you’ll receive will come from actually trying. The world will tell you if your idea is sound or not.
- It’s all just a big game. At the end of each level of a video game, there’s always a difficult challenge or a monster that must be defeated. Life is no different.
You don’t fail in a video game and throw yourself on the couch while lamenting that you’re a failure. Handle your failures in life the way you’d handle failures in a video game. Just start over and keep trying until you’ve beaten that monster. - Ask, “What if…”. What if you did fail? What would happen? Likely, nothing would happen at all. Everything in the world would continue as it always has.
- You are stronger than any failure. You might not like the idea of being wrong or of failing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take it. It may take some practice, but you can learn to get past failure and on to success.
Failure might not be so bad!
It’s not hard to see that failure can be viewed positively. It provides accurate feedback on your road to success. You’ll never learn more than you’ll learn from failure. It has so much to give you if you’re willing to accept it. Fail quickly and often!
“Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.”
- Oprah Winfrey
Learning to Accept Failure
Failure is the best teacher you’ll ever have. It can’t be emphasized enough. Not only should failure be accepted as part of the journey to success, it can be viewed in a positive light. When you understand how much failure has to offer you, you might come to view failure as a friend.
These action steps will help you appreciate failure and all it provides:
1. Write down all of the significant mistakes you’ve ever made. Keep a mistake/failure journal. Whenever you’ve received less than ideal results, write it down. Start with your earliest memories and work forward. A few examples might include:
- Times you played it too safe and regretted it later.
- You ignored a gut feeling and regretted it.
- You said something that you later regretted.
- You made a faulty assumption without getting all the facts.
- Maybe you ate too much ice cream at the fair and got sick.
- Perhaps you dated your best friend’s ex and ruined your friendship.
“Mistakes are always forgivable,
if one has the courage to admit them”
- Bruce Lee
2. Look for patterns. We are creatures of habit. Any mistake we’ve survived, we often repeat. What are the mistakes or failures that you’ve made repeatedly throughout your life?
3. Ask yourself what you could learn from each of those mistakes. What is the lesson to be learned? What is the moral of the story? Each mistake or failure is a learning opportunity. What could you have learned?
4. What could you do to prevent each of those mistakes in the future. Is being familiar with your past mistakes enough? Maybe it is. Maybe there are steps you need to take to ensure that you don’t repeat your mistakes.
- Think about each of them and determine the best course of action in the future.
5. Ask yourself how great your life would be if you had only made each of those mistakes once. Think about that. You’ve repeated many of your mistakes. Consider what your life would be like if you learned from every mistake you made and never repeated that mistake.
- That’s the power of failure. It’s the most effective way to learn and enhance your life. So, fail quickly and fail often.
6. View your actions and decisions as experiments. Think of anything you do and say as a search for the truth. If it doesn’t work out, you need to try something else. It’s just a failed experiment. There’s no reason to avoid a harmless experiment. Experiments are fun and interesting.
How do you feel about failure now? It’s easy to see just how valuable failure can be when viewed from a positive perspective.
Each failure is an amazing opportunity. Change your view of failure and you’ll be less resistant to making mistakes. Failing is ultimately a good thing.
“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget
the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it.
You don't let it have any of your energy,
or any of your time, or any of your space.”
- Johnny Cash
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