Though the saying “Failures are stepping stones to success” is so familiar to us, we roll our eyes when it is flung at us when we are at the verge of breaking down, we must give some credit to the person who said this first because failures indeed are stepping stones to success. In case you didn’t notice, it’s quite easy to say that we must fail in order to succeed but acting accordingly post-failure is a tremendous task that most people find difficult to achieve.
Here are a very few tips that we can follow in case we lost the game and are pushed back to square one.
Knowing When To Let Go
Stubbornness is a quality possessed by many of the change-makers who stay put in their stand and refuse to budge and this often leads them to create something new and shake age-old foundations. These people have led us to move further up in technology, space, literature etc and are looked back on as true legends. But one must know when to be stubborn and when to accept defeat. This knowledge will help us get over our loss and start a new beginning. Just like how therapy cannot help an alcoholic who is stubborn to accept that he or she is an alcoholic, one cannot rectify their mistakes unless one accepts the fact that mistakes have been made by him or her and that is why he or she failed. Hence the first step to get back on track after a let-down is to accept our defeat. This will make us ready for the next step, which is to put the project that cost us our time, energy, and mind, firmly in the past. It will be hard and heartbreaking to do so, but like reading a book, we can move forward only if we turn the page.
Introspect
Once we have come to terms with ourselves, we need to put it on paper. Writing helps one organize their thoughts and will lead to self-realization. Being honest with ourselves will help us lose some worry because we will have a clear picture of what went wrong and why.
Mend Ways
Now we must realize that when we messed up, we had taken a few people down with us – the people who believed in us, who were by our side during the crisis, and who were hit worse than us when we failed. It is vital that we say sorry to them for the harm caused and apologize for our mistakes. We must strengthen our bonds with them again. It’s obvious that they’ll be angry and upset but you mustn’t run away from the confrontation. If you do, they will lose respect for you and you will lose respect for yourself.
Get Your Support System
Once we are through with this, we must seek shelter from our support system that may include our parents, friends, mentors, etc. Talk to them, listen to them and we will have a chance to express our self as well as gain ideas on how to recover from the impact or move forward – ideas that we may not come up with on our own. Their support will propel us forward and help us get back in the game. With our support system backing us, we must take up new works and projects and thereby get back to routine. The longer we wait, the harder are our chances to get back on track. We can start out with something small. Nailing it will boost us up. Our secret weapon towards success is the failure that we endured. We have learned from our mistakes and gained experience.
Though the changes we need to make are subtle, it matters a lot because it leads to a very BIG outcome, like Vivek Sreenivasan, a Startup Mentor blogs about. Thus, though we may have lost our footing somewhere in between, we can raise our self back on track by following these simple hacks.
