Failure is unavoidable. It’s unrealistic to expect to sail through life without a hiccup.
These tips on how to cope with failure may encourage you to bounce back:
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- Count every trial as an act of courage, a small success in itself. Building persistence can accomplish great things and turn failure into success. Those best remembered in history were often faced with numerous obstacles. Their successes were achieved through hard work and sheer determination. Thomas Edison, who developed many devices, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera and the electric light bulb, said: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. Sir Winston Churchill declared: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”.
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- Failure can create balance in your life and present an opportunity for personal growth. If you accept the inevitability that things won’t always go your way, you can avoid becoming bitter and twisted, and won’t simply rest on your laurels, never pushing further to realise your full potential.
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- See each failure as an opportunity to strengthen your determination in the face of criticism. This is a far more positive and self-sustaining response than giving in to believing the often nasty and thoughtless things other people may say.
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- Step back and give yourself some breathing room. People don’t usually recover from a large failure overnight. It takes time for the emotions to heal. Ask yourself: “What did I learn? How can I improve?” Forget past failure and focus on the bright future ahead.
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- Reach out to those who care about you and learn how other people cope with failures.
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- Stop worrying and start laughing. Being able to laugh at yourself for making stupid mistakes can be an important part of the healing process, readying you for moving on again.
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- Make sure that you haven’t made the failure seem worse than it is; partial failure is also partial success. Draw out what was successful and build on that.
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- Sometimes failure can be an indication that your success lies somewhere else. As the famous French fashion designer, Coco Chanel quipped: “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door”.
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- Decide that you’re going to move on. It won’t happen automatically. You’ll have to rise up and say: “I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the better of me. I’m moving on with my life”.
Sources
Osteen, Joel. 2013. Your best life now: 7 steps to living at your full potential. Goodreads Inc.
www.onlinecollege.org
www.psychologytoday.com
www.wikihow.com