Apr 24, 2024 4 min read Self-Improvement

The Rollercoaster of Emotions: Understanding Failure and Emotional Resilience

Understandng failure and emotional resilience can help us in many ways. Personal development can be significantly improved if we learn how to learn from our mistakes. First we need to understand it.

Failure is something we stumble on almost every day. We all have our failures. Some are bigger than the others. Some ruin our days, and some do not change our day at all. To learn how to overcome failure, we must learn the true meaning of failure and what it does to our feelings. If we know what it does and how it works, we can learn how to overcome it. If we learn how to overcome failure, we can learn how to learn from it. Finally, if we learn from failures, we will improve ourselves through failure. But first things first, today we will try to understand failure and emotional resilience.

Today we will discuss the following topics:

What is Failure?
Not Achieving Goals
Making Mistakes
Experiencing Setbacks
Rejection
Criticism
Expression of Feelings

What is Failure?

Failing is perhaps one of the most feared things in the world. The definition of failing is as follows: “The state or condition of not meeting a desired or expected outcome or goal.” Failure occurs in almost all aspects of life, including personal endeavours, professional pursuits, relationships, and academic and creative endeavours. But most importantly, failure is natural and inevitable for humans. Failure occurs in five different ways.

Not Achieving Goals

The first type of failure is not achieving a goal. Definitely not a good example, but think of the New Year’s resolution. Every year we set new goals for the upcoming year; we almost never achieve these goals. It is not a good example because most of the time we do not set goals we really care about, so we don’t feel like we really failed. But if we really cared about a certain goal, we would feel like we had failed whenever we did not achieve it. An athlete who sets goals for themselves to be a world champion is not happy with second place. They did not achieve their goal, and most of the time they feel like they have failed.

Making Mistakes

The second type of failure is making mistakes. This is often in combination with not achieving our goal. We want to get a good grade on our exam, but we made a mistake in our calculations, which cost us the grade that we wanted. We failed the exam because of it, and we feel stupid; we feel like we have failed.

Experiencing Setbacks

Setbacks can be out of our control or go hand in hand with a big mistake. A setback that is out of our control is, for example, an accident that happens and needs a lot of time for recovery. Because of that accident, we missed out on a lot of things. We can’t exercise as much as before, which is why our goals on this aspect have not been reached. A big mistake can also be a massive setback. For example, someone who is trying to quit doing drugs will have a relapse. That person feels like a failure after that relapse. Setbacks can truly break all the progress we have made. Or at least we think so.

Setbacks are the most dangerous types of failures, because it is something that puts us off track and can get us into the same old problems as we have experienced in the past.

Rejection

Rejection is something that is feared by many. Think of all those videos on the internet where students get the message that they are not selected for the university they dreamed of. Also, the reason most of the people are nervous about a job interview. Rejection is often a harsh experience, and that is why it is feared by many.

Criticism

For some people, criticism is failure, but this one is more personal. Some people see criticism as something positive, and they do not feel like criticism is a form of failure. Others cannot handle criticism at all. They feel like criticism is something negative and is some form of rejection of their ideas, for example. They feel like they have failed once they receive some criticism.

There are more types of failure, but most of these types can also be put into one of the five categories. And all these categories are not mutually exclusive; most have overlapping elements.

Expression of Feelings

The feeling of failure can be expressed in a lot of ways. Some people get sad, depressed, lack motivation, are disappointed, and become insecure. Others get angry because they feel embarrassed or guilty. All these emotions can stop us from developing ourselves. So, it is something we need to overcome. Overcoming these emotions is easier said than done. Next time, we will discuss how we can overcome these emotions.

How do you feel after failure? Let me know!