Find a Reason to Celebrate a Personal Failure

Failure is like a light shined on your path ahead. It suddenly becomes clear what you can learn next, what you can improve in order to keep growing. Each failure teaches us something. If we can handle the disappointment without giving up — and that is one of the hardest skills for any human to learn — then each failure becomes the best teacher we could ask for.

The catch is that most of us learn to be scared of failure, to avoid it at almost all costs. That means that we stay in our comfort zone too much. We avoid venturing into new territory, and new territory is where our growth and full potential are waiting for us.

If you want to realize your full potential as a human, you will have to fail. And if like most of us you are afraid of failure, perhaps to the point of avoiding taking a risk on important opportunities, then a good way to start changing that is to celebrate a personal failure. This flips your story on its head, turning something that might feel like a dark part of your history into a meaningful chapter in your adventure.

Getting Started:

•  Step 1: If you’re human, then you’ve definitely had many failures already. Think of one that still has a little sting to it. Maybe it was from long ago, or just happened recently.

• Step 2: When you have one in mind, try imagining that it happened to someone else, say a friend you know. Imagine that they’re telling you about it, feeling terrible, and you want to help them have some perspective, to see that it wasn’t all bad, to see that some good even came from it. What advice would you have for them? How would you help them see the positive sides? This doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t hurt. But if you can help them be disappointed and keep going anyway, you’ll help them get the real value from their failure. If you like keeping a journal, try to write down 3 pieces of advice you would offer your “friend” who had this failure.

• Step 3: Take a look at those three pieces of advice. Would you be willing to accept them, if given to you? Is one of them really valuable? And is there some value in this failure? Take a situation of flunking a test, or being rejected when you asked someone out. What good could possibly come from that? Seen just a little differently, flunking the test might lead you to realize you need help, and then to ask for that from a parent, teacher, tutor or mentor, ultimately getting you on a better path in that topic. Being rejected might teach you how to let someone down easily, because you wish that had happened to you, and now when it’s your turn at some point to reject someone, you can do so more kindly, and hurt them less. In each failure there is a lesson customized for you. Don’t let the disappointment, real as it is, block you from seeing that lesson.