31 Days {Day 7} – Change your feelings about failure

Winston Churchill is quoted as saying, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Churchill was right about one thing…failure can surely be demoralizing. When we feel as though we’ve failed, it’s difficult to scrape ourselves off the floor, stand back up, and keep moving. Never mind keeping up our enthusiasm! But as much as we try to avoid it, failure is a part of life. And while we can’t necessarily choose when we fail or what we fail at, we can certainly choose our response to failure.

Take a moment to reflect upon your successes and your failures. Now ask yourself these questions. When I have grown the most? When I have learned the most? I’m willing to bet that as painful as your failures may have been, they were also the moments that shaped you. I know that my biggest failures have also been my biggest periods of personal growth. I’ve learned so much more from my failures than from my successes.

The problem is that, in moments of failure, our tendency is to do one of two things. Sometimes we run fast and hard, trying to get as far away from those failures as we can get. We denounce them, we ignore them, we force ourselves to forget about them. Our other tendency it to use our failure as a stick to beat ourselves with. We remind ourselves of our failures and then drown in our guilt and our embarrassment. But the best thing we can do when faced with failure is to learn from it. Failure is really a teaching moment and we are best served when we can take advantage of it by learning as much as we can, if for no other reason than to avoid repeating the same failure again.

So the next time you are facing failure, consider these five questions:

• How do I define failure? Do you have a “Perfect or Fail” approach to life? Sometimes we feel as though we’ve failed when we actually haven’t. We all know people (or perhaps we are those people) who hold themselves to completely unrealistic standards. Ask yourself if your standards for success require perfection. Because let’s be honest here, perfection can be tough to achieve. Sometimes “good enough” is all you really need.
• Why did I fail? If after considering your definition of failure you still feel like you failed at something, consider the reasons why you failed. Was it lack of planning? Poor communication? Lack of organization? Poor judgment? Also consider the things that contributed to your failure that were outside your control. I’m not telling you to blame someone else for your own mistakes, but I am saying that we are not islands. Sometimes our own failures are partly due to circumstances outside our control. Nevertheless, to learn from failure we must first understand why we failed.
• What did I do wrong? Now that you know why you failed, try to understand what you specifically did wrong. For example, imagine that your child fails a test at school. You ask them why they failed the test and they tell you that they didn’t know the answers. Okay, that’s the general reason why they failed. But now it’s important to get specific. Why didn’t they know the answers? Did they study the wrong material? Did they not understand the material? What exactly went wrong?
• What did I do right? Even in the midst of our biggest failures, there are still things we did right. Maybe our motivation for doing something was right but the end result turned out poorly. Maybe a project failed due to poor communication but our organization was spot on. Failure can be discouraging, so it’s important to remind ourselves that even in the midst of failure we are still capable of doing some things very well.
• What have I learned about myself? Every failure, big or small, shows us something about ourselves. Use failure as a tool for self-examination. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? How can you use this failure to improve yourself?

And then, when you’re done learning from your failure, maintain your enthusiasm and move on.

This post is part of the 31 Days Series-Choose Your Change. Did you miss a day? Visit the 31 Days Welcome page for links to each day.