When Things Go Wrong—Are They Failures or Opportunities?

Many people try new ideas and when they don’t go well for them, they give up and feel like failures. Others, after trying new ideas and failing refuse to give up and continue to try and many of them succeed, and those who don’t just enjoy the experience and turn their hands to something else. 

 

Why do some people choose to make the most of the experience no matter what the result may be and others rate it a failure if things don’t go well? The answer is an optimistic attitude to every experience in life. Successes are achievements enjoyed today and failures are learning tools for future experiences. There are no failures; they are simply steps towards future successes. 

 

Learning to laugh at our mistakes and to dream big dreams are two very important characteristics that optimists develop that enable them to look at something that some may call as a failure as a learning opportunity. When we take our selves too seriously, we are more likely to think of our failures as permanent and they often attack our sense of self-worth. When we can focus on our other successes and see this as a setback that we can laugh at and continue to dream of success next time we maintain our optimism. 

 

So how do we deal with failure so we can see it as a learning tool for the future? 

 

1.  Challenge what you think of success and failure. It’s our perception of them that makes us see failure as negative and success as positive. Failure is simply part of the journey to success, the ultimate destination. 

 

2.  When you feel a failure because of a poor result or outcome, set yourself goals immediately, deciding how to continue your journey to success. The old, but familiar saying of “climb back on your horse immediately after you fall off” is based on this concept.

 

3.  Look at a failure from the perspective of the big picture, not the small picture. You may have not achieved the outcome you wanted, but you did achieve. Make a list of all the things you learned and gained from the experience and celebrate those things. They are achievements, it is not one complete failure, but many small achievements and they deserve to be celebrated.

 

Failure is about opportunity and embracing failure as opportunity helps to eliminate failure from your vocabulary helping you to stay optimistic and find success in everything you do.