The recent blog on Psychology Today titled Turning Failure into Fuel for success discusses a study about failure and success in the Journal of Psychology of Sport and Exercise (see reference from article). A team looked at what occurs to us when we fail and whether how we manage our thoughts and feelings has an impact on future success or failure.
What they discovered may not surprise you. When we fail it has an impact on our self-esteem and we feel negative emotions such as anger, anxiety and shame. It depends on how we cope with the self-esteem hit in relation to (1) whether the failure impacts our future performance, (2) whether we face failure and accept we may do better next time and (3) accept that it is useful to fail for future success.
There are, however, a few steps that assist with this process of moving on.
Firstly it is important to own the failure as your own which involves acceptance of the failure and taking responsibility for you as your own.
Next, don't go with the temptation to over-analyse the failure and ruminate and think over & over again about the process as a way of finding a key or solution. What’s occurring when you do this is you wrap yourself up in anxiety and potentially more anger, only to discover you can't let it go. You begin thinking about it all night long and all day long.
Notice all the feelings you have around the failure - shame, anger, anxiety, frustration and sadness. Accept what they are and don't label them as good or bad.
Bring out the self-compassion and smother yourself in it when necessary. Beating yourself up wont help you move on. Go back to step one and have a firm self-conversation about self-forgiveness and all humans fail and make mistakes.
Then identify what you need to get done or to change and what order the steps need to be in. Plan for action.
Finally be willing to change and adapt if necessary. Do you need more flexibility? Do you need to let it sit and rest for another season or time?
All failure can be useful to teach us and can lead to success. How we cope with failure is the key. So go on, when you fail today try to think another way around it.
