Do you want to know how to deal with failure: accept, handle, and overcome it?
If you do, then you are not alone.
Failure is an inevitable occurrence in every human’s life.
Hence, nobody can dodge it.
Failure is a happening that can crush a person’s dream, inspiration, motivation, goals, and hope if they allow it to.
This should not be you.
You should be strong and keep going regardless of failures.
The way to do this is by learning how to deal with it; accept, handle, and overcome it.
In this article, we will share great tips and information on how to do this.
So, we advise that you carefully follow this, to learn to accept, handle, and overcome failure.
To begin, we will look at what failure is…
What is Failure? – How to Deal with Failure: Accept Handle and Overcome
Failure is the condition or state of not achieving desired or intended objectives.
It is said to be the opposite of success.
Failure is relative.
That is, it is based on people and their belief systems, views, goals, etc.
Failure happens to everybody.
It is the way you understand and deal with it that matters.
Failure for one person can end up bringing positive outcomes.
While for another person, it can bring more negative outcomes.
Hence, every individual needs to be careful with the way they deal with failure.
Importance of Failure in Life – How to Deal with Failure: Accept Handle and Overcome
Have you ever heard people say ‘failure is important in life?’
This is something that not everybody agrees to.
However, it is true.
As failure is inevitable, it also has its importance in life.
Nonetheless, you should understand that failure is not important in life to keep people down.
It is the way you react to failure that makes it work to your advantage and become important in your life.
Most successful people are thankful for the failures they experienced because of the things they learned from failure.
To better understand what we are saying, let us look at some reasons why failure is important in life.
To Learn
Failure is the ultimate lesson in life.
It serves as a great teacher.
Failures help people to reconsider, rethink, and discover new strategies and ways to achieve their goals.
In other words, people get to learn things that they could have never learned if failure had not occurred.
When you learn, you grow and become better than before.
Hence, you should not be scared of failure.
However, you should not anticipate failure, but accept it when it happens.
It Helps To Reduce Fear – How to Deal with Failure: Accept Handle and Overcome
Fear stops us from going out of our comfort zone and reaching our full potential.
However, failure can help us reduce our fear.
For example, when you fail while doing something and you handled it well, it will give you thicker skin.
As a result, when you try again, you will not be as scared as the first time you attempted.
This will make you more prepared and brave to push yourself out of your comfort zone.
It Helps to Reduce Ego
Several people hate failure because it does not help their ego.
Failure can make the proudest men humble.
It tames people and makes them see a better way to their situation.
If you have a big ego, you might find it difficult to listen to people’s opinions and views.
However, failure can reduce your ego, and make you more open to listening to others.
For instance, you want to engage in something you have never done before.
So, instead of listening to people who have the experience you brush them off and do it your way.
Unfortunately, you end up failing.
This will make you regret not listening to those people, perhaps make you ashamed of yourself, and ultimately reduce your ego.
As a result, you will be more open to people’s opinions the next time you want to do something.
Check here to discover why a big ego reduces your chance at business success.
It Serves As a Motivation
Failure can be a great way to boost your motivation depending on how you see it.
It all boils down to your perception.
Yes, failure makes us feel emotionally low.
However, when you see failure to be nothing more than a setback, it will push you to go on.
You will work harder to not fail the next time.
Several entrepreneurs have success stories because they pushed on and got more motivated after a failure.
These people can boldly say that failure was important for their success.
Tips on How to Deal with Failure: Accept Handle, and Overcome
There are three steps to dealing with failure.
These steps are; accept, handle, and overcome.
If you cannot accept failure, you will not be able to handle it.
However, when you can accept failure, you will handle it, and then work to overcome it.
We want you to live and succeed even when failure comes.
And failure will surely come.
So, we have prepared some useful tips that will help you to accept, handle, and overcome failure.
1. Allow, Identify and Understand Your Feelings
When people fail, they end up feeling different emotions.
These feelings are hardly positive ones.
They can range from shame to anger, to despair or disappointment.
These feelings can make their failure beat them if they do not do something about it.
As a result, they might find it difficult to accept, handle, and overcome that failure.
So, when you fail, you have to fight your feelings.
Since you cannot just stop feeling that emotion, then you need to let it flow.
Letting your emotion flow will ensure that it does not stay bottled up and mess up with your mental and physical health.
For example, if you are disappointed with yourself, you could get depressed if you keep that feeling bottled up.
However, when you allow it to flow, you will be able to let go of the feeling and move on.
While you allow yourself to feel those emotions, ensure that you identify and understand why you feel them.
When you can pinpoint the reason behind your emotions you will find it easier to move on.
Therefore, allowing, identifying, and understanding your emotions will help you to accept the failure that occurred and move on.
When you don’t do these things you will be stuck in your failure, unable to accept it, and move on.
2. Accept – How to Deal with Failure: Accept Handle and Overcome
When you have let go of your feelings and understood the reason behind them, you should look at the failure itself.
In other words, you have to accept that the failure happened.
To do this you need to do some reflection.
Look at those things that lead to the failure you experienced, and the consequences.
You can even have them written down.
However, ensure that you stick to the facts alone, and avoid justification, blame, or judgment.
If you are not satisfied or cannot fully express yourself just by writing, you can discuss the happening with someone.
This person can be your trusted family member, friend, or counselor.
However, they have to be someone who will help you avoid denial when addressing the failure you experienced.
When failure occurs, some people go into denial.
They refuse to talk about their failure, or how they might have had a hand in it, or ignore the consequences.
This does not help them to move past your failure.
So, if you discover that you are cannot accept what happened and move past it, then you should figure out why you are in denial.
Identify and confront that fear that is making you not accept that failure.
Once you can do this, you will accept what occurred and move on.
3. Understand that Failure does not Define You
Humans tend to think that they are failures because of the failure they have experienced.
This is especially true when they have experienced failure in different aspects of their lives.
As a result, they get beaten down and unmotivated to go on.
This should not be so.
You are not a failure!
Failures are just setbacks you experience; they do not define who you are.
So, understand this and remind yourself every time.
The fact that you failed today does not mean you will fail tomorrow.
So, pick yourself and keep moving on.
4. Remember that Failure Has its Importance – How to Deal with Failure: Accept Handle and Overcome
As we earlier discussed, failure has its importance in life.
Several successful people can attest to this.
When you hear their success story you should pay attention to the failures they experienced.
Many of them failed several times but kept pushing till they got to where they are.
Failure does not have to be a setback at all times.
Sometimes it can be a teacher or a motivation to do better.
Hence, never let failure weigh you down when it occurs.
Look at it from the positive side of things.
We know that this will be quite difficult, but remember those successful people and their success stories.
You cannot effectively achieve success without experiencing some failures.
So, accept them when they come and deal with them.
5. Do not Play it Repeatedly in Your Mind
When failure occurs, people tend to play it repeatedly in their minds.
They go through all the things they could and could not have done in their mind.
As much as it is good to reflect and learn from your failure, this can be quite unhealthy when you keep ruminating about it.
This is because it intensifies negative feelings.
So, do not obsess over a failure.
Rather try something different
Writing can serve as a good way to get rid of those ruminant thoughts.
It will also help you to identify those underlying fears.
So, write down your thoughts,
Discover what you can learn from that failure instead of beating yourself up.
Also, you can practice meditation or mindedness to keep you in the present and avoid worrying about the past.
6. Identify and Drop Negative Habit of Thinking – How to Deal with Failure: Accept Handle and Overcome
As we earlier said, failure can be useful or important to your based on how you perceive it.
Your perception is gotten from your mindset.
So, you have to examine your mindset and identify those habits of thinking that might make you see failure as a horrible thing.
Yes, failure is not to be anticipated.
However, you cannot avoid it, so you have to handle it better by seeing it from a positive angle.
So, what are those negative habits of thinking that will make you hate and beat yourself up because you failed?
An example of a negative habit of thinking is the ‘go big or go home thinking’.
This habit of thinking is not so great.
The reason we said this is because when you go big and experience failure, you will get depressed and give up.
You might be like ‘after I gave my all, I still failed, so I might as well give up’.
Yes, giving your best is essential and going big is great.
However, giving up because you gave your best and you still failed will take you nowhere.
Instead, it will make you remain in that failure without achieving success.
You might feel that the habits of thinking you have are good but when you examine them closely you might notice some negativity in them.
So, ensure that you identify and drop those habits of thinking that will make failure become the end for you.
7. Address What Led To the Failure
The tips we have been sharing so far will help you accept and handle failure better.
As we said, when dealing with failure you don’t just accept and handle it, you also have to overcome it.
Coming out victorious after a failure is what makes you stronger.
To achieve this, you will have to critically address those things that lead to the failure you experienced.
Ask yourself questions that will help you identify what you should have done and not have done.
By now, you should have known how to handle your feelings and thinking, so that you will look at things logically and critically and not emotionally.
Some questions you can ask yourself when addressing the causes of failure include:
- What are those things that happened which made my goals fail?
- Could they have been avoided or stopped?
- What are the possible actions I could have taken to them?
- What might have been the result of those actions?
- Was my goal realistic?
Ask yourself these questions.
You can also discuss with your loved and trusted one to get better insights.
Get to know the answers to the questions, and start making moves to improvement.
8. Set New Realistic Goals
When you have discovered and sorted through your previous disappointment, then you have to start working on setting realistic goals.
Think of that thing or things you want to achieve next.
If it is the same thing you wanted before, look for a better path to achieving it.
Consider the actions that would ensure success.
Also, share your goals with your trusted people to measure how realistic your goal is.
Understand that if your goals are not realistic, you will not achieve success.
For example, if your goal is to become a prominent business in your business sector in a year, then you have to ensure you have what it takes.
If your business does not have those things that can make it prominent and you do not work to get those things in a year, you will fail.
So, ensure that your goal is attainable and realistic.
This way you will avoid failure.
9. Engage In Mental Contrasting
As you are planning your new goal, you will need to engage in mental contrasting.
Mental contrasting will enable you to see two opposite sides of things.
It will help you to think optimistically and plan realistically.
This way, you will not only think about how things will go well without considering the obstacles or difficulties that will come.
Thinking optimistically will help you stay hopeful and positive while working towards your goal
While planning realistically will help you envision those obstacles that might stop you from achieving your goal.
It will also enable you to think of the actions to take to handle those obstacles.
This will help you to overcome failure.
10. Try Again – How to Deal with Failure: Accept Handle and Overcome
With your goal and a solid plan in your place, it is time to take the first steps towards your goals.
However, before you do this, track your progress so far.
Examine if you are doing anything wrongly.
If you are, do not hesitate to go back and reconstruct your path or approach.
Do not beat yourself about it.
You will learn as you move on, and a few changes and adjustments are not harmful.
Do not be scared to try again and again.
Understand that you cannot overcome your failure and achieve your success overnight.
11. Have a Support System
We are humans and we all need people during our low and high times.
A support system gets people through difficulties and failures better than when alone.
So, ensure that you have trusted people who love and respect you, and will be there for you.
These people should be able to encourage you to accept, handle, and overcome any failure you experience.
They will also serve as motivations to keep pushing till you overcome failure.
12. Get Inspired – How to Deal with Failure: Accept Handle and Overcome
Dealing with failure is not so easy.
We are all humans and when failure comes it tends to get to us.
However, excellence comes when you strive for it.
If you do not fight to beat those feelings and thoughts that will weigh you down, you will be stuck in your failure.
So, you have to put in your best and overcome that failure.
When you are inspired, you will find it easier to keep pushing on.
As we mentioned, several people have experienced failure several times but today they have success stories.
You too can be like that.
Listening to people’s success and failure stories can serve as an inspiration.
Reading good articles, books, and stories can make you more motivated.
When you find yourself getting depressed about failure, then you should find inspiration, deal with your failure and move on.
Conclusion on How to Deal with Failure: Accept Handle and Overcome
Failure is inevitable.
Hence, every individual should be able to deal with failure when it occurs.
To do this one needs to accept, handle, and overcome failure.
In this article, we have shared information on how to do this.
So, we advise that you put the information to good use.
