It's hard not to learn how to build resilience after a failure, especially if you're determined to overcome failure. Resilience is an important life skill that must be developed. And when you develop (and learn) resilience, it helps you in other ways, too. Here are 10 fundamental lessons to learn when you feel like you've failed in life.
In a survey conducted by Linkagoal, 31% of the 1083 adults surveyed were afraid of failure, a higher percentage than those who feared spiders (30%), of being alone at home (9%) or even of the paranormal (15%). Reliving our moment of failure is of no use to anyone. But the truth is that the time we spent in this place of unnecessary repetition could be better spent working to take 100% ownership of the parts over which we had control and that caused the failure. The goal is not martyrdom and we want to avoid guilt.
We want to recognize the mistakes we recognize through self-reflection and express our 100% responsibility in conversations with external parties that were affected by our failures. Baseball players who have a batting average of 300 or more are often considered stars or potential checkerroom players. However, what this means is that if you have a batting average of 300, you're essentially failing 70% of the time. Life is nothing more than a great opportunity to be very good at failing.
There are plenty of opportunities to mess it up when you feel like you've failed in life, but there's much more than 10 big lessons to learn. You're not perfect and that's okay. Once you've accepted it, you can begin to reorient the way you think, going from feeling bad for having made mistakes to recognizing your faults and learning from them. Failure is a powerful catalyst for personal and professional development.
However, some people may not have the tools that allow them to quickly overcome losses and begin to learn from failure. An important life lesson that failure can teach you is that not all ideas are worth your time and effort. Often, you might fail not because of your execution, but because the idea you were pursuing wasn't worth it. When you experience failure, you learn to better filter your ideas and create goals that are important to you.
Failure teaches you to prioritize and pursue things that are promising and that will benefit you in the long term. The best lessons I've ever learned in my life were born out of failure, and the most impactful one was when I went to college. If analyzed in depth and taken with the right spirit, failure can teach us valuable life lessons for a better future. The difference between successful people and everyone else is their determination to turn failure into life lessons that strengthen their resolve.
