Dealing with Failure

If you haven’t failed, you are doing something wrong. Failure is the foundation for success. These tips can help you when dealing with failure.

1 – Consider Failure as Tuition

If you are new to something, how can you expect it to work on the first try? You either need to learn more about what you are doing or alter your process by using the knowledge you obtained from your failures. You should consider these failures, as well as what you learn, as part of your tuition for your business.

2 – Believe in What You Are Doing

Imagine if Thomas Edison didn’t believe that the lightbulb was possible. He probably wouldn’t have tried the 10,000 times that he tried. It’s likely someone else would have eventually come up with the invention, but it probably would have happened much later in history. He was successful largely because he believed that his inventions were possible.

If you don’t believe in what you are doing, it’s going to be difficult to succeed. What will motivate you to keep driving towards your goal, if that goal is fuzzy to begin with?

3 – Put Aside a Lack of Belief from Others

Whatever you try, you are going to get people who are against what you are trying to do. It could be family members or friends. Or, it could simply be negative people who you engage in casual conversation. The difference between you and all of them is you know what you are trying to accomplish. Getting back to the belief that it is possible, they don’t share that with you, at least not as strongly.

4 – Give Yourself Permission to Fail

When you set yourself up knowing that it’s okay to fail, it makes the process easier. When it happens, because you planned for it, you have the mental capacity to continue. This gives you the ammunition to push forward and continue what you were doing.

5 – Learn from Your Failures

If you don’t learn any lessons from your failures than you’re doomed to repeat them. Analyze exactly what went wrong and record it. Make sure you refer to your log of failures so you will recognize them if they happen again.

6 – Offer to Help Others

When you fail at something, and you learn of someone else who failed in a similar way, reach out to them and offer support. If you are both at the same stage of the failure, then you can bounce tips off each other. If you have already failed at something and determined what went wrong and what steps you took to recover, offer those tips to someone who has not figured it out.

7 – Stop Dwelling on Failures

Although you should welcome failure, people often use them as a way to come up with excuses. Don’t do that. If you feel like you are dwelling on your failures, keep in mind that there is nothing you can do about them anyway, other than using them to improve for the future. As long as you keep your beliefs and your push to succeed, your failures will never stop you.

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Actionable Steps