We often come across the word failure a lot of times in our lives. It is often believed that success starts with the failures. Failure can be defined as the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective and may be viewed as something opposite of success. Failure can be of various types that may range from failing in school examination or failing to make something, product failure ranges from failure to sell the product to fracture of the product, in the worst cases leading to personal injury, the province of forensic engineering. Failure has a wide range of use, but most commonly based on the grades scored by a student in his test or exam in school or college. Failure is part of life; expecting to progress in life without facing any hurdle sounds unrealistic and failure prepares you up to get stronger in life. Avoiding failure also prevents you from focusing on gaining the resiliency needed to cope with it; a vital element of bouncing back, hence failure is a necessary part of success.
Failure is inevitable; all of us have experienced it once or more than once in our lives and one cannot run away from it and all of us fear failure. Failure tends to bring back some bad memories that no one wants to think about again in their lives. There is not a single person on the face of the earth who has not seen failure at-least one in his life. There are a lot of us who look at failure as something which ruins us and hate failure, but the key to success actually lies with failure. It is difficult to succeed without failure. The right way to face your failure is to learn from your failure, about what went wrong or where you were low on your part. An intelligent person always accepts his failure with dignity and learn from his failure, whereas there are also people who are much busy in trying to hide their failure, rather than learning from the failure. Failure should always be taken as motivation to work even harder. Failure is not bad, if one tries to learn something out of it, instead it is better to say that failure is:
- Practice
- Failure makes us smarter and stronger
- Failure makes us resilient
- Failure prepares us for success
- Failure allows a deeper appreciation for success
How to handle Failure Effectively?
There can be different types of failures and also different ways of dealing with failure. The feeling of failure is a personal one and everyone have their own unique ways of dealing with it and it is something you everyone has to learn to deal with. It is not easy realizing that all of the hard work that you put in to reach success did not work out the way you thought to be. No one expects failure in advance and always comes unexpected, after failure most of the people want to isolate themselves whereas there are also some who just want to move on and forget everything that went wrong. Instead, these are the people who learn from their mistakes. It is important to note that a failure is not a failure anymore if you learn something meaningful out of it. Experience of failure can make you wiser, smarter person and leads you towards success. In other words, failure can be good for us, but it is upon us to decide how we take it. There are people who let failure take over them and surrender to it, while there are also some who really cares about the reason for failure and get up and do something about it. However, some effective ways of dealing with failure are:
- Reason: One of the first steps towards dealing with failure is to find out the reason behind the failure. Remember, if there are no hurdles in your way towards being successful, then your goal isn’t worth it, you won’t enjoy your success as much as you would when you achieved it by fighting hard for it. One of the greatest facts of human life is that success is not an easy ride and failures will definitely come in your way to success. But the need is to ask yourself that what did you learn from this? How can you improve? Don’t blame anything or anyone for it. It is better advised to just sit with a calm mind, and try to find out the reason behind your failure. Note down what went wrong and what should be improved. Once you have it all set, think about what you are going to do now. Forget about the failure in the past and think about the bright future you have ahead of you.
- Forget about what People Say: Your success is your own, your career belongs to you and no one other than you have any right to comment or interfere in this thing. It is basic human nature that we easily get influenced and affected by people around us and what they say about us. It is a fact that people do like to gossip about the failures of other people, remember, this is your life, and what others say should not matter. If someone really cares about you, they will not say hurtful things to you aimed at your failures instead they would come to you and motivate you to overcome your failures and also give you suggestions to improve you in a better way. People who stay by your side when you’re down will be the ones who will be genuinely happy when you progress.
- Try Again: Failure should not be a setback; instead, you should see it as another opportunity to perform even better. Give it another shot and try to learn from your mistakes, try harder than ever. Most important thing is that one should not give up their hopes and have an attitude of trying again and again, with more passion until you achieve your goals. Give it your 100%. That way, you’ll know that you gave it everything; you gave it your best shot, and leave the rest to God. A person with such an attitude never faces failure for more than once and quickly learns from his mistakes.
- Motivate Yourself: Motivation is the key to success. Never lose faith in yourself and remain motivated throughout. Not believing we are good 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. The most important thing to do is to have faith in you. In times like these, people often have a feeling of worthless and tend to lose hope in themselves. Don’t let that get to you. It is very important to motivate yourself. Remain normal and try to stay around positive people who lift your spirits and try your best to keep your distance from negative people who always bring in negative vibes.
The real difference between people who become successful and overcome failure and those who do not come down to how you manage failure and how you remain motivated. Feeling inadequate is a commonplace human feeling that even very public, very successful people feel but they don't let it keep them down. Think positive thoughts. Believe in yourself no matter what others say.
- Stop Worrying: Things might be miserable for a little while but there is no point worrying unnecessarily and this won’t help. Worrying about the past situation won’t help you out in any way. Instead of worrying will only bring wrinkles and grey hair. The greatest thing you can do for yourself during a failure is to remain calm; you may go in for meditation or yoga. 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. Though it may be difficult for you to laugh, still smiling can help a lot in healing.
Failure as a Lesson
As we have discussed earlier, failure is a part of life. You may encounter failure in any part of life, it is not the worst that you can expect, but the worst may lie in the way that you deal with it. If you try to learn something out of it, then failure can be a learning experience. However, if you consider failure as the end of opportunity, then it can be the worst part. To make best out of it try to review, what your failure has taught you. There are always things to take away from a failure, to inform your future direction. There may also be the case when your partial failure may give you quite an opportunity to return back even stronger, remember partial failure is also a partial success and if you can draw out what was successful and build on that, the sense of having failed lessons. Failure is often interpreted as a sign of personal inadequacy, and an intelligent person is one who tries to find out this inadequacy and finds out an effective way of dealing with these. Your failure can teach you a lot:
- If you are determined to progress then, 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.
- Another important teaching is that failure is about mastery. It's easy to flip from one new thing to another. Failure can teach you patience. 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. Hence there is an inter-relation between the two.
- Failure gives you a chance to know yourself even better. Failure teaches you about will-power, persistence, self-discipline, and the value of hard work. It is during the failure only, that you really learn about your inner-powers and how to control yourself during the tough situation.
