It’s Friday and that means this will be one of the lighter posts here on the GBW Blog. I’m finding that these posts are doing pretty well amongst all the posts we do here in the blog. And that’s encouraging. I’ll keep doing them as long as you keep reading them.
But I’m finding that not every one is a success. Some are failures. I try something a little different and it doesn’t work out.
Failure.
It’s something well all deal with just about every day. I can’t really think of many days in life when I haven’t had at least one or two failures even if they were small failures.
I think a tendency in life is that as we age we look to avoid failure. It makes sense. We don’t want to do risky things that might cause us harm or pain. We all have a desire to live and succeed.
But avoiding failure is not the way to succeed. You have to try things. You have to learn and adapt. And you have to keep going and going because a thousand failures could lead to learning one successful way to do something and then you’re sitting pretty.
Dealing With Failure
But this post is not about how to fail. It’s about accepting failure and learning how to properly deal or cope with daily failures.
There is a new study shared on one of my favorite blogs about Dealing With Failure. Here is the breakdown:
Worst Ways To Deal With Failure
- Self-Blame
- Denial
- Social Support
- Venting
- Moping
Best Ways To Deal With Failure
- Acceptance
- Positive Reframing
- Comedy
After reading those I starting thinking of the way I deal with failure. And I think I cope with it fairly well and I do use a couple of the best ways to deal with failure.
I have definitely used some of the worst ways to deal with failure. And I can now realize that those do not work. I’ve blamed myself for failures and while that may be true it’s not going to make you feel better.
Denial is an interesting one. I don’t know if I do that, but I probably do. I do know that some people will gloss over failure and I think that’s a way to doom yourself to repeat the mistake.
And that’s where things like acceptance make sense. You acknowledge what happened. You accept it and you figure out how to move on. And probably the sooner the better in that scenario.
Positive reframing is a good one too. Bad things happen, but you can usually pull out something positive. I was watching a documentary on the Eagles. And Don Felder was kind of forced out of the group in 1999 or so and he hasn’t been with them. Don Henley and Glenn Frey felt they deserved a bigger cut since the band had evolved.
And Glenn Frey said that Don Felder could only focus on what the others were making and not on what he was making.
And that’s kind of positive reframing. Instead of focusing on what you don’t have (a full cut of the profits) you focus on what you do have (you’re a member of the biggest American rock band of all time).
I know I do that sometimes in life. I focus on the negatives and I’m sure it’s common. Now it’s good to know that reframing things is a good way to cope.
Final Thought
So each day you’re going to deal with failures. Use these coping mechanisms to deal with those failures. You should be happier and I think it will also put you in the frame of mind that allows you to keep moving forward and focusing on succeeding in the future at whatever you’re doing.