How I Deal With FAILURE!!!

I want to start off this blog telling you that I do not believe that there is such thing as failure when you have tried to do something. True failure comes from not even trying in the first place due to fear of not getting the result you want. People that tell you that they failed an exam, failed a marriage, failed really anything are not actually failing. Ok sorry to be redundant with all of the “failures” lol.

So why did I name this blog “How I Deal With Failure”? It’s because most people would rather see that than something like “How I deal With Finding Out a Different Way of Doing Something Because the Results Did Not Turn Out the Way I Planned”. It’s a mouth full isn’t it?

So let me tell you how I go about dealing with a situation that I was not expecting, or one that I did not like. I simply learn something from it. I have gone through a ton of therapy and have listened to a ridiculous amount of Buddhist talks to change my way of looking at “failures”. They are all learning experiences which means that they aren’t failures at all. Sure, you may have failed an exam, but you learned that the method of studying that you did wasn’t right. Sure, your marriage didn’t go as planned, but you learned that you were not in the right relationship. Sure, I failed an experiment and managed to spill leaded water all over the place, probably causing me to ingest the same concentrations of lead that were found in Flint, Michigan’s water, but I learned that I need to be more careful when it comes to things like that.

The only true failure is when you just don’t try. I tell people all of the time to just try and do something even though they “know for a fact that it will go bad”. The future is completely uncertain and you never know what will happen. I see how my thoughts stop me from even trying something, but I will force myself to do it, and then it turns out it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

By changing your mindset, and I believe this is a major part of cognitive behavioral therapy, you will see that failures do not exist. You you happen to screw up pretty badly, learn at least one thing from it. If you embarrass yourself and call that a failure, laugh about it and make it into a funny memory. Life is way too short to not take risks and worry about failure. I am learning a great deal about not being afraid to fail in grad school. I have been told “no” so many times and I have messed up more times than not, and you know what? I learn something each time and I continue on. I grow from these experiences and you will too. It’s a long process, but my God, it is life changing.

3 thoughts on “How I Deal With FAILURE!!!

  1. All of life is a learning experience, or put another way, every experience in life is a learning opportunity. I would go even further, and say that learning = changing, so that without any change occurring then there has been no learning. I remember the first time I came across the Kolb Learning cycle/process. It was like a bullet between the eyes, I was in my late 30s, highly educated, successful career, but suddenly realised how much learning I had missed because I just didn’t understand what learning was or how to enable it. The next 40 years of my life have been a wonder of exploration.

  2. Great Blog!

    Thank you for following me so that I could discover it! I’m finishing my Executive MBA and (hopefully) starting an MSW program in September. This is going to be a great resource for me AND many of my followers.

    You state: “The only true failure is when you just don’t try.” I agree with this for the most part, for most people.

    I tend to avoid things I don’t want to do – and that alone is enough for me. If it’s something I HAVE to do, and I don’t do it, that is a failure. But when it’s simply deciding something isn’t worth my time, effort, or the possible emotional toll, failure doesn’t feel like the right word. Just some food for thought.

    Thanks for the great message! Learning by experience is a wonderful thing. I can’t wait to look through some of your older posts.

    Best,
    Sonja

  3. Pingback: Graduate School Hacks – MINDFULNESS IN GRAD SCHOOL

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