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Failure is part of our life. To succeed, you need not only to understand that mistakes are inevitable, but also to work with them in cold blood: to anticipate, recognize, analyze, eliminate and, most importantly, move on.
Nobody likes to be wrong. But the fear of making a mistake is worse than the mistake itself. He condemns us to a life in which there is no place for risk, fantasy and determination. This is the path to eternal dissatisfaction and disappointment in yourself.
Competent work on mistakes depends entirely on your attitude towards them. Psychologists Annika Scholl and Kai Sassenberg have found that those who bounce back most easily from failure are those who focus on what they want to achieve, rather than on possible failures.1.
People who make history see failures as stepping stones to new achievements. Winston Churchill said: «Success is the movement from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.» Thomas Edison created a working light bulb after 1000 attempts. When asked how he managed not to give up after so many failures, he said, “They weren’t failures. It’s just that the process of inventing a light bulb involves 1000 steps.»
What separates people who let failures break them from those who use their failures as a springboard for new achievements?
Actions are important. Your ability to recover from falls. But also how others evaluate you. Here are five steps you need to take to keep your spirits up and inspire respect in others.
1. Admit your mistake first
You made a mistake. It makes no sense to cross your fingers and hope no one notices. By acknowledging a mistake, you show that you are in control of the situation. If someone else notices your miscalculation, you will be in a less advantageous position. In addition, others may decide that you were silent out of cowardice and cannot be trusted.
2. Explain why it happened (but don’t make excuses)
If you offer a simple and truthful explanation of what happened, it will do you good. “We blew the contract because I missed the deadline” sounds better than “We blew the contract because my cat got sick, I had to take care of him, and because of this I couldn’t meet the deadline.”
- How do you deal with failure?
3. Think ahead about what your first step will be.
One of the problems with perfectionists is that they don’t factor in the possibility of error in their plan. The slightest failure knocks them out of the rut. It is better to immediately recognize that the work can break at the most inopportune moment, and think over your actions in this case.
4. Think about how to avoid mistakes next time
Don’t let negative events hypnotize you. Even if you yourself are to blame for the failure of an important deal or you know that you have unsuccessfully prepared for a meeting, conduct an honest debriefing. Stick to the rule: «No reproaches, no regrets.» Imagine that you are a robot that has found a bug in the program and is just trying to fix it.
5. Switch!
Don’t let failure undermine your self-esteem. Many people believe in the «lucky star», in black and light stripes. The problem is that such beliefs put our motivation at the mercy of some external force. But if you get down to business with redoubled zeal, you will soon find that the bitterness of failure does not bother you as much as it seemed at first. The longer you focus on your feelings, the harder it will be for you to switch.
See more at World Economic Forum.
1 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2014, vol. 53.