Recover from Failure and Thrive | How to Bounce Back Toward Success

Failure is something every single one of us experiences in life. When we are making maximum impact in the world and following our purpose, failure will be inevitable because we are doing things we have never done before. This is why it’s so important to learn how to recover from failure and thrive. 

What is the importance of recovering from failure?

Failure builds our resiliency and helps us collect information that we didn’t have before. That is all failure is – data! It’s a learning experience that shows us one way of not doing something.

Failure also does not make the entire experience a loss. As Napoleon Hill said, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartbreak, carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” That means our failures are simply a step on the way toward success, and it is our job to find the benefit in the experience. 

As we adjust our perspective, use the information we gathered from the experience and we reapproach, we get to try again, building our resiliency, which is an excellent benefit of failure. The more we can learn from our failures, the more resilient we can become, and the more successful we can be.

Why is failure so painful?

We go into almost every situation with expectations, especially when we are trying to do our best. Then when we experience failure, we feel a sense of loss because of those unfulfilled expectations, which hurts us emotionally. 

That can get further compounded when the pain of a situational failure is internalized, and a person starts thinking they are a failure, which is extremely detrimental to our mental health. 

I think it is very important to say that no one is ever a failure. No one. We can have things that don’t go our way, which could be caused by a huge variety of things we didn’t plan for, but that is not a reflection of who we are at the core of our being. 

In order to move toward success, it is vitally important to separate the situation from the person, and take in the data gathered to build a new strategy. 

How do I come back after a failure? 

At the core, failure is a result produced from a series of actions. So is success!

Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before successfully making his lightbulb and as he is famously reported to have said, “I did not fail. I found 2,000 ways not to make a light bulb.” Each iteration moved him closer to the creation that finally worked. 

That is the kind of mentality we need to develop to bounce back from a failure and move toward success. We need to objectively look at the actions we took, or didn’t take, to see how we can use the information to adapt our approach to get closer to our goal. 

Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• Was the planning well-rounded or was something missing?
• Were there communication issues that contributed to the result?
• Was there information missing, and how can it be gathered now?
• Were the right people in place?
• Was additional help necessary? Where was it most needed?
• Were there assumptions made that were inaccurate?

As you start to analyze the questions, you will very likely see ways that the situation could have been approached differently, or perhaps you will find a completely new opportunity that you just couldn’t see before…and in there lies the “seed of an equal or greater benefit.” 

Using those insights, that you really couldn’t get in any other way, will help you recover from failure and thrive!

The fastest way to gain the success you want is to learn from a Master Mentor, who can share the wisdom they have learned from their failures and successes, and help you build a personalized strategy to make your vision a reality. CLICK HERE to learn more about my Master Mentor Program now.