Aparna’s Weekend Musings on Life – Series 4 – Accepting and Celebrating Failures
Why don’t we talk much about our failures?
Because when you just had met failure the pain
is real, wound is deep and you try to ignore the feeling of despair, gloom,
frustration and many such negative thought processes.
Any
failure big or small hurts you and causes physical pain, emotional pain and it
may be coupled with any stress related health issues.
I personally have made friends with
failure many times. It one of my favourite timepass to keep trying, fall down,
achieve little something then fail miserably, cry, pick myself up to start
something else afresh. I personally believe that we learn
to rise up stronger right after every time we fall down. It teaches us
perseverance and resilience.
A
beautiful quote from Anne Baxter “It is
best to have failure happen early in life! It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you
so you can rise from the ashes.”
Trying
and failing at something is no fun. We feel upset, disappointed, and even
angry.
All
of us fail time to time but how we react to it is important. We can learn a lot
after a defeat, particularly about our environment and how we label things and
perceive people around us.
The
problem with this reaction to failure is that it shuts us down and makes us not
want to try anymore, and that’s what leads to true failure: a lack of
further attempts.
On
the other hand, if we can learn to celebrate our failures as steps toward
success, we will continue to put in effort, keep trying, and eventually achieve
the results we want. We cant celebrate it in a grandiose manner as soon as we
fail but eventually we must learn to accept it and slowly move to celebrating
failures.
Acceptance
with Building resilience and perseverance are crucial to grow from
our failures.
Faced
with failure, how do we respond? We are disappointed by failure, by what the
people in our life say? How do we feel & face them while sharing the news
that we have failed with them? How would they react before & after we tell
them? When our “thing” — our business, job, sport, health, etc. — isn’t getting
the results that we would like, similar to the conversation in our head. One possible
effect of failure is losing sight of why we felt capable enough to
try it in the first place. In other words, we “lose” our self-confidence after a failure.
Donts:
1.
Don’t use sarcastic or negative self
talk even in your head.
2.
Don’t give more than 5% importance to
other’s opinion
3.
Don’t keep blaming yourself. Accept
criticism and take an mental oath to progress yourself.
4.
Don’t get angry and upset with
yourself. Forgive yourself.
5.
At times its ok to sit down and do
nothing
6.
Don’t let your negative emotions
control you.
How
can you develop more resilience and perseverance than you currently have?
Here’s a step-by-step guide that may help you:
Step
1 :
Recognize
that resilience and perseverance are qualities you would like to develop
further.
Step
2:
Be
aware of your current emotional reactions to failure!
Step
3:
Decide
how you would like to react to failure in the future.
Step
4:
Start
practicing how you would like to behave when people criticize or make fun of
you. It could be your friends, family or anyone around you.
Step
5:
Forgive
yourself for the mistake you did. It is ok to take responsibility for the
failure. Believe that you can do better than this and encourage yourself.
Step
6:
Reflect
on what you learnt during this failure, how did people react to you, how would
you like to change it?
Step
7:
Reflect
on your positives, strengths and what you learnt from this failure and pat
yourself.
Step 8:
Simulate
a high positive environment and increase your expectations of yourself.
Step
9:
Focus
on reducing your stress and decluttering your mind of various strong emotions.
Step
10:
Be
simply happy.
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