How to overcome failure?

 

“Fall seven times. Stand up eight.” — Japanese Proverb

Failure hurts. To put it mildly, it’s a painful experience, one that many of us work tirelessly to avoid. Often, its effects can be long-lasting, leaving a mark in our minds, and creating a mental hurdle that can be difficult to overcome in later years.

But failure is also necessary.

When we fail, we tend to ponder, searching for new meaning to our lives, exploring the potential for possible answers and solutions for achieving our goals. In fact, failure is a crucial part of goal achievement. It acts as life’s guiding light and as mother nature’s chisel, playing an important role in improving each subsequent iteration and generation of life.

But as much as we can reason about the importance of failure, when we’re going through it, it’s hard to see the forest through the trees. It’s hard to overcome failure to achieve our goals when all we can see is pain and agony.

I’ve experienced my share of monumental failures. I know just how much it hurts to fail and to do it on a massive scale. Failure certainly left its mark on my life, and it wasn’t a simple matter of picking off the bloodied scar. The healing took time. But through it all, I came to some important realizations, much the same that other people do after pushing through failure.

I also came to realize that there are many ways to overcome failure and achieve your goals. However, all them require a major mental shift in thinking. It requires a certain way of looking at things in your life, and steering your thoughts in the right direction while sowing the seeds of success to reap the rewards at a later date.

Here are 5 ways that you can overcome failure in your own life to achieve your goals.


 


1. Look at it as a chance to face down your fears

Sometimes, it isn’t even the failure itself that scares people; it’s the fear of failing that holds them back from doing something. But, overcoming failure is also a chance to face down your fears. It’s a chance to overcome that innate desire to run far away and cower in some corner.

The pain-pleasure paradigm is very real. We will always do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. But, when we can leverage that knowledge and overcome our fears to achieve our goals, a transformational shift occurs. There’s an incredible feeling that goes along with it, and it’s an invaluable experience to pave the way for a lifetime of achieving goals.

2. Use failure as a learning experience

When we fail, it should be a chance to learn from our mistakes. When we can use that knowledge, put it behind our belts, and push forward, some tremendous things can happen. There are a number of ways we can actually learn from the failure, but in order to do so, we need to look at the failure objectively, like an outsider looking in.

Ask yourself why you failed. Where did you go wrong? What could you have done differently? Was it your plan? Was it because you failed to see something you should have seen? Did a bad habit do you in? Really look at it objectively and learn from it. Use that knowledge to improve yourself and try again. As long as you don’t give up, you can always overcome failure to achieve your goals.