Rebounding From Failure

Failure is painful, and far too often the advice for overcoming failure is to minimize how you perceive the impact instead of allowing us time to grieve and process that we’ve lost something meaningful. Every failure is a complex loss of effort, hope, and the reality that we did not reach a goal. Allowing ourselves to grieve will aid us in the recovery process. Having a plan for what grieving will look like is something I build into every plan I make. I know, for me, I set hard deadlines for my success and while I often achieve my goals, I don’t always achieve them within the time frame I have set or in the exact way I’ve imagined. Understanding the ways in which you most typically experience failure will allow you to decide how best to grieve when those instances come into play. We all fail to meet our own expectations, and that at its core is what failure is. It is failing to meet our own expectations.

If we look at all achievements and what our expectations were regarding how we reached those achievements, most of us will have failures based on unmet expectations. There are times in our lives when we are offered opportunities we do not value, and we do not view not achieving or seizing those opportunities as failures because we made an active decision. Understanding that our standards and expectations we set for ourselves are active decisions, we can deconstruct them and analyze which ones serve us best. I personally value my tight timelines because more often than not, I am able to reach them meaning that how often I “fail” in this regard is limited. I also know how to grieve not reaching a self-imposed due date and that for me is analysis of my health, energy, and tasks that are due on a weekly or even daily basis.

The ability to have a process in place that requires honesty with self can feel self-indulgent, especially if done with compassion. I argue that a little self-indulgence is not always a bad thing. Taking the time to understand your motivations, and ability to have successful goal achievement, will improve your life by leaps and bounds. This understanding and deconstruction of the goal setting process will put failures in perspective while also honoring the depth of loss each failure creates. Allowing yourself to grieve the loss and the challenge of understanding how the loss was created will improve your ability to understand if it was a failure or a set setback. I find in life I almost never actually fail and that failure is an emotional perception and experience of not meeting my own expectations no natter how unrealistic. I find that grieving, deconstructing, and then making a new plan allows me to succeed in ways that previously I would have missed and changed my entire relationship with goal setting and what failure truly means. For me, true failure is the inability to try again or try something new. This doesn’t mean I never feel like I’ve failed. This means that this feeling of failing doesn’t stay with me forever, and I am able to forge a new path.

Posted on Monday: 24 July, 2023