There is nothing worse than feeling like a failure. Some
people simply cannot stomach the thought of being unable to live up to their
own expectations or the expectations of others. One setback can sometimes send
a sensitive person reeling for days, even years, and sink them into a deep
depression.
However, there is nothing more defeating than allowing
yourself to stay stuck in the mindset of believing that a plan didn’t work out
because you or your planning process was inherently flawed. When we circle the
blame onto ourselves again and again, it can take us years to recover from the
abuse we are heaping onto our psyche. You are not worthless because a plan you
attempted to put into action hasn’t succeeded yet. You are courageous for
putting in the effort at all.
Just because something didn’t work out taking one course of
action, that doesn’t mean that you are doomed to fail eternally. It simply
means that it is time to regroup and fall back on plan B. Or C. Or D. You could
go through as many variations of your plan as many times as you need to. The
important thing is that you never give up. You could go through the entire
alphabet again and again until you figure out what works to make your dream a
reality. If it means enough to you, then don’t stop believing that success is
possible.
This can be easier said than done. Bouncing back after a
setback can seem impossible at first, but the first thing you need to do is to
remember to breathe. If you panic, nothing good will come of it. Your best
course of action is to approach the situation with a cool and level head, and
although that may be hard to do at first, you are more than capable of it!
Next, give yourself a little bit of time to regroup and
process what has happened. Why did your plan fail? What was it that got in the
way? How could those issues have been avoided? What could you do better in the
future when making a more foolproof plan B?
Finally, take some time to consider just what you have
learned from the process of failing. Failure is not permanent. It is simply a
stage that we go through during the evolution of a plan or an idea. Failure
means that there are more complications than we anticipated, and we are
learning more and more with every little mistake that we make. By the time we
succeed, we are so steeled against setbacks that the next goal we attempt to
accomplish may seem to come much easier to us, because the setbacks are not so
devastating.
We can turn our setbacks into gems of truth and a will of
steel, or we can let it defeat us. But nobody has ever mastered their destiny
by giving up. To become a great achiever, you keep going until you have
achieved your goal at all costs!
