Turning Setbacks into Lessons: Extracting Wisdom from Failure

The hardest but most important thing after failure is to learn from it. Failure is one of the hardest things in life that we need to overcome. Overcoming it is not easy. After failure, we feel sad, depressed, anxious, guilty, or angry. These emotions do not allow us to learn from our failures. So, first, we need to overcome these feelings; we must be resilient. After we manage to get back into our working mode, we can study our failures and learn from them.

Today, we will discuss the following topics:

• Understanding the Feelings of Failure
• Being Resilient
• The 6 Steps to Turning Failure Into a Lesson
• Key Takeaways

Understanding the Feelings of Failure

The feelings of failure are the worst feelings in the world. We feel sad because we missed a great opportunity, we feel angry because we made a stupid mistake, and we feel guilty because we lost something important to someone else. Everyone knows these feelings. We must learn what these feelings are in order to overcome them. Understanding the feelings of failure is the first step. A previous post (https://www.maxwagenaar.net/the-rollercoaster-of-emotions-understanding-failure-and-emotional-resilience) goes more in depth on this topic.

Being Resilient 
Bouncing back is something almost everyone does all the time. But sometimes it is so difficult to be resilient after a massive failure. A guide on how to overcome the feelings of failure would come quite handy. Read about it here: https://www.maxwagenaar.net/building-resilience-practical-ways-to-move-past-failure. This post discusses four easy steps to overcome feelings of failure. Overcoming feelings is the most important thing about being resilient. So, definitely read the post about it before continuing.

The 6 Steps to Turning Failure Into a Lesson

1. Accepting Failure. This step will form the foundation of our future successes. Accept that shit happens; everyone experiences failures at some point in their life. One person has problems with family; the other loses all their money at a roulette table. Everyone has failures. Some people look like they don’t experience failure, but they do. We will just not see it because they often handle failure much better than we do.
2. Reflect on what went wrong. We need to reflect on what went wrong. By looking into what went wrong, we can prevent making the same mistake in the future. It will increase our understanding of failure and of our feelings. Journaling can be a great way to reflect on what went wrong. Read more about it: Pages of Self-Discovery: The Magic of Journaling (maxwagenaar.net).
3. Identify the lessons learned. Once we have reflected, look back at our reflection and wonder if something is not right. Or something that changed our way of thinking. Search for the changes and see if that is the cause of our failure. Look at what we have learned about ourselves and think of ways to improve in the future.
4. Adjust our approach. Once we know what went wrong or what changed, We know what we can do in the future to prevent it from happening again. We need to make changes in the way we approach things. Or start trying new things, just to change our approach. Learn a new skill that will help us in the future. Do whatever we need in our approach to optimise it.
5. Stay Resilient. On our way back to the top, we will experience failure again and again. We must stay resilient. We cannot give up at any moment. When we fail again, we just start the process of learning from failure again. Another failure? Another lesson. Keep going.
6. Act. Now that we know what went wrong and what we need to change, We can act again. We know what to do and, especially, what not to do.

Takeaways

To learn from our failures, there are six steps. But before we can use the step-by-step guide, we need to know what feelings failure brings and how we can overcome these feelings. After we know that, we can start with step 1. First, we need to accept our failure. Once we have done that, we can reflect on what went wrong. If we know what went wrong, we know what we must adjust in our approach. We need to change our approach and stay resilient. Then it is already time to act again.

How do you overcome failure? What are the biggest lessons you learned through failure? Let me know!

Links

If you want to read more about this topic, you can use the following links:

Why Learning From Failure is Your Key to Success (betterup.com)

Strategies for Learning from Failure (hbr.org)

The smart way to learn from failure (bbc.com)

What Exactly Do We Learn from Failure? | Psychology Today

8 Golden Lessons: What Can We Learn From Failure (stunningmotivation.com)