Recovering From Failure – You Must Learn This

Okay, so you’ve been giving it your all.  Well, maybe not your *all*, but a good portion of your all.  And you’re not seeing any progress.  So now what?  Are you doomed to failure and never to succeed?  No!  Keep reading.

One thing that you need to understand is that failure is an event, not a person. 

It doesn’t define you as a “loser” for the rest of your life—unless you let it.  Failure happens to you—it isn’t who you are.  You’re not a victim, but it also doesn’t define you.  So when it happens (notice I didn’t say “if”), pick yourself up and get ready for the next event in your life.

You must adjust your attitude as you recuperate from a failure.  You will rise to your own expectations.  Psychologists call this a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” and we are suckers to believe our own words.  So adjust your attitude to the positive side of things.

Remember the guy who came up with the brilliant idea to change Coke? 

Back in the 80’s (for those of you who were mere babes during that decade), someone had a stroke of genius—or so he thought.  The Coca Cola company decided to compete more with Pepsi, and changed the formulation of their signature product—Coke.

They called it “The New Coke.”  It bombed.  No one enjoyed the new taste and the calls were immediate to bring back “the old Coke.”  After a few months of hemming and hawing, Coca Cola executives brought back the original formula of Coke and ditched the new stuff—and its creator.

So what happened to the guy whose idea this was?  He left Coca Cola and began to look for new work.  The trouble was, his name was well known in the business community and everyone connected him to the failure that New Coke was.  He finally landed an interview in which he got a fair shake:  the interviewer asked what he had learned through the problems the New Coke had created.

Naturally, he indicated that he had many lessons learned from the fiasco.  He didn’t let failure define him, and he ended up landing the job for which he was interviewing.  Good for him, right?  But good for the company that hired him, too.  They were willing to take a chance on a creative risk-taker who had a very public failure on his record.

Many of those who are considered to be “successful” have had failures dot their lives. 

Rush Limbaugh, the king of daytime talk radio, was fired multiple times from different radio jobs.  He also filed for bankruptcy—twice.  So you can see how Limbaugh didn’t permit failure to define him.  Those failures were events from which he recovered and moved on.  And you should take the same tact when confronted with something that didn’t turn out like you hoped it would.