Nobody likes failure, however, everybody who tries fails at some point. We all have a bumpy road to success and experience many ups and downs before we become successful in our respective fields. Setbacks and failure are inevitable and inescapable and nobody is immune to it.
Sure, failure is a bitter pill to swallow. The sting of a disappointment, the agony of a letdown and the pain of defeat is hard to endure. It can hurt us deeply, crush us and leave our ego bruised. But failure doesn’t have to be demoralizing, discouraging or the end of our journey.
If you have the right perspective, failure doesn’t mean it’s over. It simply means that we didn’t succeed this time and need to look for a different way to achieve our goal, just this time with more experience, knowledge and wisdom. Failure can work in our favor big time, if we look at it the right way. Keep in mind, failure itself is not detrimental. What’s damaging about failure is the paralyzing effect it can have on us if we let it.
Here are our TOP 10 ways how you can rise up when life knocks you down.
#1 Take Time to Feel the Pain
When you fall flat on your face you may feel like you want to deny the situation. Don’t. Instead, allow yourself to feel the way to feel and be vulnerable. Whether you feel angry, inadequate or depressed, accept your feelings and take the time to feel your emotions. Grieving the failure or setback is a good start to refocus on what’s to come. Keep in mind, you can’t rise up if you deny the fall and avoid the fact that you actually fell and got hurt. If you do so, it will only weigh you down and come crashing down later. So feel the pain, cry if you want to, scream on top of your lungs. Let all your emotions and feelings out, because you will feel better afterwards.
#2 Accept What You Can’t Change
Understand that whatever happened, happened and it can’t be undone. You can’t change the fact that your business failed and you are now in deep debt. You can’t change the fact that your spouse left you. Don’t ignore the situation, so try to accept what you cannot change and focus on thinking what comes next. Acceptance is the first step towards the healing process and the sooner you are able to accept the situation and understand that you can’t change it, the better it is for your ability to rise up again.
#3 Take Responsibility
Everyone fails at some point, there is absolutely no shame in it. Own your failure and take full responsibility for your part in the situation. You must be accountable for your decisions, choices and actions. Never try to shift the blame onto someone else and hold them accountable for your failures. Passing the blame is a sure recipe for disaster, so own your responsibility.
#4 Forgive Yourself
When life knocks you down, it’s absolutely normal to feel guilty and pile on self-hate. But at the end of the day, you have to be kind to yourself and learn how to forgive yourself. Just think about all the other people who have been in your situation and were successful in living through it and move on. Do your research and find out how they were able to recover. One of the most powerful ways to be able to rise up again – even in the midst of all your troubles – is to find the strength to forgive yourself.
#5 Learn from Your Mistakes
Henry Ford already said that the only true mistake is the one from which we didn’t learn anything. Mistakes and failure teach us like no other can. You must learn from your mistakes and take the lessons of failure to heart. Make the best of your mistakes, embrace them as incredible learning experiences and never repeat them again. Observe what went wrong, analyze your part in it, identify your weaknesses and work on them to turn them into your biggest strengths.
#6 Move On
The worst thing you can do to yourself is to dwell on failure. Stop ruminating over it and re-playing it in your mind over and over again, feeling sorry for yourself. Keep in mind, failure is simply a temporary detour, but not a dead-end. Failure lasts only so long until you succeed again, so don’t let it become permanent and scar your mind and psyche. A positive outcome never grows out of negativity. Wipe the slate clean, move on and make a fresh start. Only when you are able to move on do you give yourself the chance to recover and rebuild yourself.
#7 Get Into a Positive Frame of Mind
When we face defeat it is easy to be engulfed by self-doubt and fear and usually fear comes with a dark cloud of negativity. Positive thoughts are the last thing on your mind because you start to question yourself and everything around you. Of course rebounding and recovery takes time, but in order to facilitate the process and make it faster, we have to fight all the negative thoughts and instead fill our mind with positivity. Reflect on your own life and remember all the success and accomplishments that you have achieved so far. Nothing can inspire you more than your own success story, so get into a positive frame of mind and rise up.
#8 Focus on Bettering Yourself
Don’t let setbacks steal your confidence. Train yourself to take bad hits in stride and use failure to better yourself and learn and grow. Like we just said, maintain a positive attitude in the face of failure and strengthen your mental toughness. Everyone experiences failure, but what we do afterwards makes all the difference. Most of the time we fail because we weren’t properly prepared or didn’t plan right. Know that this can be fixed easily, so make a list and do everything in your power to improve, develop and put things right.
#9 Redefine Your Goals
After failure you have to evaluate your options and redefine your goals. Assess what went wrong, ask yourself what you could have done differently and think about how you will change things next time around so you don’t make the same mistake twice. But it’s also important to think about the bigger picture. Keep in mind, one of the daily habits of highly successful people is goal setting. Write down your ultimate goal and break it down into smaller daily goals. And remember, goals evolve as we evolve, so don’t worry, your goal doesn’t have to stay the same for a lifetime and can and will change as you start working towards achieving it.
#10 Begin Again
If you allow it, failure can devastate you. But keep in mind, it can also be the beginning of a new journey as you start to rebuild yourself if you choose to. Failure should never be the end of your goals, dreams and aspirations. Setbacks should motivate you to chase your dreams, make a fresh start and create a new beginning. Instead of letting failure bring you down, rise up stronger, tougher and more resilient and don’t just survive failure, but bounce back stronger.
After a setback or failure you have two options. You can either give up and quit or you can choose to pick yourself up, get back on your feet and start all over again. The choice is yours, but if you want to steer yourself towards success and transform your life for the better, you have to learn how to rise up and get back on track again.
FAILURE AND SUCCESS GO HAND IN HAND
Joschi & Monika
#BoldNaked