From Failure To Growth
“We are all failures- at least the best of us are.”
― J.M. Barrie
Everyone in their life face many situations when they think that it’s all over and they are wasted. Failure is something everyone fears but no one escapes. It is inevitable. Different people handle failure differently. Some grow some don’t. My approach of handling failure is a three stage process – accept, scrutinize and grow.
When you fail and are in denial about it, it harms in you ways you don’t realize. It makes you weak and with every subsequent failure your weakness increases. Denial leaves no room for growth. You will fail in similar situations and circumstances again and again. So the first step to overcome failure is to accept that you have failed. Acceptance settles your troubled mind and pacifies the tumult therein. Then it fills you with positivity and makes you feel good about yourself. Now once you have accepted and realized that you have messed up and your mind is at peace you are ready to go to next step that is - scrutinize.
You need to think and list the causes of your failure. And remember these causes can be internal or external. Internal causes include you own doings, habits and thoughts. External causes comprises of causes which are beyond your control. This is a very tricky part since you may play the blame game here. You may say since a person didn’t give you the notes or some information or data, you did fail. But this is not an external cause. Why didn’t you look for data or information somewhere else? It’s your own fault and an internal cause. Therefore, even if you think some person or some situation led you to failure you need to analyze if it was in your capacity to prevent or remove that cause. If it was then it is an internal cause.
As far as external causes are concerned, you may overcome most of them by breaking it down into internal causes. Sometimes your belief or attitudes are the foundations of an external cause. You might have failed in a project due to a part of it which your friend did and you had no part in it. But realize here that your attitude of trust led you to failure. Most of the time almost all the causes are internal. Really very few external causes exist. One example of external cause can be that loud music is vibrating your room because some fun party is on nearby and you can’t revise for tomorrow’s exam. But even this can’t lead you to absolute failure, since you would have read your books earlier. If you haven’t then it’s your internal fault that you waited for last night.
An external cause can never led to absolute failure. It can only cause hindrances. It is actually internal causes sometimes combined with external causes that lead to failure. Any failure includes 98-100% of internal causes and 0-2% of external causes.
Once you have listed your causes and divided them into external or internal, ignore the external list. They don’t have the capacity to cause your failure neither you can do something about them. So get in a deep study of internal causes. Adjust your habits, attitudes and believes and then improve. You may want to improve or learn some skill or start a new habit so as to prevent that cause to be hurdle in your future tasks. According to your causes to may take necessary steps. This will lead you to the third stage that is growth.
These processes will eventually help in self development and self growth. You will grow mentally and become more mature. Whenever you fail keep applying these methods and keep growing. This self growth and hard work help you find success and achieve your dreams.
