Failure is part of life. I don’t know anyone who’s succeeded in any field who hasn’t failed in some way. But we all feel as if failure is JUST US! It’s just us who feel the hurt and inadequacy of failure. This is partly because most people don’t share their failures out loud – they lick their wounds in private and present their most successful face to the world.
I’m lucky, I’m a coach with friends who do some seriously cool stuff in the world, so I get to peek behind the curtain at the perceived failures of the clients I’ve worked with over the past 12 years; and of my friends who have had launches bomb, entrepreneurial ideas fail, and experienced all manner of fuck ups!
If you’re nursing the wounds of failure at the moment, here are my top 10 tips to help you recover from failure:
1. Give yourself MEGA self-care and self-love
Cradle and cocoon and love the heck out of yourself. Failure hurts like hell, so give yourself the best care and most love you can. It’s ok to retreat to your cave and lick your wounds…just don’t stay there forever!
2. Get MEGA support from your Dream Team.
Figure out what you need from others and ASK for it. If you need a hug, ask for it. If you need your cheerleaders (you do have them, right?), ask them to remind you how fabulous you are. If you need to know you’re not alone, ask your fellow Big Dreamers to share their experiences of failure.
3. Write it out
All the disappointment, hurt, anger, disillusionment…the lot. Write out your pain – get all those icky thoughts out of your head. Once you feel done, burn it or delete it…you don’t want to hold onto this shit!
4. Dance it off.
Shake off the energy with a kitchen/office/bedroom/car disco – even one song can help shake off that icky energy. You may have a favourite ‘go to’ angry/pissed off song you can sing too… mine is “It’s not o-fucking-k” by My Chemical Romance.
5. Remember that failure is just feedback…what did you learn?
What will you do differently next time? I love doing these…because there’s always so much I learned from a ‘failure’. And don’t forget all the things you did right in the middle of your ‘failure’ – when I take clients through this, they usually find a lot of successes within the failure, the project just didn’t go exactly to plan…which leads me nicely to…
6. Did you ‘fail’ or ‘not live up to an impossible expectation’?
Most of my failures were because I had unrealistic expectations of what was possible (it’s ok to reach for the stars, but if you expect to get there on a pogo stick, you may be setting yourself up to fail!) Check your expectations….are they helping you succeed or ensuring you cannot help but fail?
7. While you’re at it, check what you’ve actually done
I’ve had clients tell me they ‘failed’ even when they got 90% of what they were aiming for. That’s not failure in my eyes! Even if you only got a fraction of what you intended, you have succeeded in getting that fraction…don’t bury your successes under the label of failure.
8. Life happens for you, not to you
…so how could not getting what you wanted be a good thing? For example, in the early days of my biz, I failed to get 40 clients a week in my business. Thank God, because 40 would have been far too many.
9. Sometimes failure shows you where you still have work to do.
For example, one of my clients ‘failed’ to fill her program…but when we talked about it, she was uncomfortable with big groups. She either needed to do the confidence work to be ok with big groups, change the ‘goal’ to be smaller groups or find a new way to deliver that program. (In the end, she actually did all three!)
10. Remember that failure shows guts and backbone.
Only the most intrepid, fabulous and courageous folk fail…because they try. The only way to avoid failure is to try nothing and stay firmly in the middle of your comfort zone. You’re big, brave and strong and you took a risk. You’re awesome, even if the result wasn’t exactly what you planned for.
I hope that helps you recover from your ‘failures’…and I’d love to hear your top tips for failure recovery too – come over to my facebook page and share your failure recovery tips.
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