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Dealing with failures


Coping with failure

Failure isn't pleasant, but it is a normal part of life that is integral for success.

Coping with failure

Failure can be an unpleasant and unwanted experience. It can come in different forms - not achieving the academic grades you hoped for, being unsuccessful in a job application, a relationship breakdown, or a general setback.

While undesirable, failure is also a normal and necessary part of life. Yet, many people will go to significant lengths to avoid failing because the emotions we can feel as a result can be so painful. Nonetheless, a fear of failure can hold us back from taking up the opportunities we might need to succeed - so, a more helpful approach is not to avoid situations that might lead to potential failure, but to change the way we perceive it.

Top tips for coping with failure

Give yourself permission to feel

When we fail, we can experience a range of uncomfortable emotions such as shame, disappointment, sadness, worry, anger, and embarrassment, amongst others. These emotions hurt, and our instincts are often to escape from them by suppressing or avoiding them. While this can bring a short-term sense of relief, it does not resolve the issue which will usually show up again, or can get in the way of healthy processing of our emotions. Rather than struggling with our feelings, it can be more helpful to allow them to be. First, try to identify and label the emotion. Then, allow yourself time to experience it, remembering that failure is a part of everyone's life experience, and actually, crucial to success.

Practise self-compassion

Self-compassion is an important step in taking care of yourself when you're coping with failure. Once you have acknowledged that you are experiencing something painful, extend the same compassion you would often give to others, to yourself. Self-compassion involves being warm, caring, and understanding towards yourself, instead of judging and criticising.

This approach is far more effective as humans are innately flawed, and will inevitably make mistakes from time to time. By practising self-compassion, you are accepting your humanity and the reality that things do not often go the way we would like. This allows self-compassionate people to be more resilient to try again when they don't meet their goals.

Examples of ways to practice self-compassion include asking yourself how you would treat a friend if they were in a similar situation, beginning a self-compassion journal, or taking a self-compassion break.

Reflect on the experience and adopt a growth mindset

Although painful, we can learn and grow from our past failures. Asking yourself, 'What can I learn from this experience?', or 'What useful information can I gain from this experience to take forward?' may prepare you better for the next challenge, and foster resilience in the face of stress and hardship.

When reflecting on failure, it can also be helpful to perceive it from a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is when you believe that your qualities and skills are fixed, and therefore, cannot change no matter what you do (e. g., "What's the point in trying if I'm going to fail?"). In contrast, a growth mindset is when you believe that your qualities and skills can develop and improve with time and experience (e.g., "It's always good to try, failure is a learning curve.").

Experiencing a failure doesn't mean you're not good enough, it might be you just haven't quite figured it out yet.

Revisit your goals and create a plan for the future

Dwelling on past failures for longer than necessary will keep you stuck. Once you have given yourself sufficient time to feel the emotions associated with the failure, shown yourself kindness and care in the midst of it, and reflected on the learnings from the experience and identified areas for improvement - it is time to review your goals and create a plan for the future.

At this stage, it is important to consider if your goal is realistic and achievable. Developing SMART goals as well as utilising planning tools are a good place to start. Importantly, keep in mind that goal setting and planning is more likely to be successful if the goal is important to you and aligns with your values.

What can I do next?

  • Watch these videos on the research behind concepts that might help you cope with failure. These include understanding concepts such as grit, your study mindset, and the power of believing you can improve.
  • Explore resources on developing your study skills at Academic Skills. You can also attend workshops or make an appointment with an Academic Skills Adviser.
  • Speaking to a CAPS counsellor can help you further understand and process your experience of failure, and develop skills to cope with setbacks in a healthy way. We also offer various workshops that may help you better cope with difficult emotions and enhance your learning experience.

If you'd like more support, come along to one of our workshops or make an appointment for individual counselling.

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Dealing with Failure | SkillsYouNeed

We all have bad days and weeks, when nothing seems to go right. We all also have times when we fail to achieve something that we really wanted and find it hard to cope.

However, some people seem much more able to pick themselves up and dust themselves down after these experiences than others.

These people are not intrinsically ‘better’ in any way: they have simply developed some positive habits and skills that help them to overcome failure and turn it into a more positive experience. In fact, they use failing as a way to learn and improve. This page discusses and explains some of these skills and shows how you can develop an ability to deal more gracefully with failure.

Understanding Failure

If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same…

Rudyard Kipling, If.

Some people, such as Rudyard Kipling in his famous poem If…, have suggested that success and failure are two sides of the same coin. In other words, neither really matters. Whatever happens, you have to pick yourself up and move on. This approach was perhaps typical of the Victorians. They felt that it was important to be able to win and lose gracefully—and that it was not appropriate to show your emotions, whether happy or sad.

We have perhaps become a little wiser about the importance of recognising and showing your emotions. However, being able to win and lose gracefully is still an attitude that it might be appropriate to cultivate.

Failing to win a sports competition, especially a major event that you have been working towards for several years, or to get a promotion or pay-rise, can feel devastating at the time. When you look back later over the whole of your life, however, it is unlikely to feature as one of your defining events—especially if you have later gone on to succeed in the same field. When humanity looks back over the last 500 years, your ‘failure’ certainly won’t feature.

In other words, it doesn’t really matter all that much to anyone else. In a few years, it won’t even matter to you. It makes sense that it shouldn’t matter now.

Of course, this is easier said than done, but there are things that you can do that will help make it ‘not matter now’.

Ways to Manage Failure

1. Recognise and accept your emotions

Failure hurts, at least in the first instance, and you need to accept that. Trying to minimise your feelings or distract yourself can be counter-productive in the longer term. Just recognise your feelings for what they are and allow yourself time to hurt a bit.

Don’t, however, dwell on it for too long. That, too, is counter-productive, especially if you blame yourself.

Take a few days for the pain to lessen, and then start to move on.

2. Don’t make it personal

One reason why some people find failure devastating is that their identity is tied up in succeeding.

In other words, when they fail, they see themselves as a failure, rather than perceiving that they have experienced a setback. Try not to see failure or success as personal: instead, it is something that you experience. It does not change the real ‘you’.

This comes back to Kipling’s point: success and failure are not intrinsic parts of you. No part of your identity should be ‘I am a success’ or ‘I am a failure’.

3. Don’t worry what anyone else will think

Sometimes our views about success and failure are tied up in what other people will think about us, or about how we think they will judge us.

You cannot ever control what other people think. Nor should you ever do something simply because it will please other people.

It is easier to accept both success and failure if you define them in your own terms, and do things because you want to achieve, not because you think other people will be pleased.

There is more about this idea of measuring ourselves by others’ standards in our page on status anxiety.

4.

Take the right amount of responsibility

We have all met people who are always ready to blame others or events for their lack of success.

  • “The referee was biased!”
  • “The teacher doesn’t like me, that’s why my mark was so low.”
  • “If only I hadn’t been ill last summer, I wouldn’t have missed several weeks of training.”

It is important to recognise when other, external factors have affected your success. You don’t need—and should not try—to blame yourself for everything, particularly if it is outside your control.

It is, however, also important to recognise what you yourself could have done to improve matters. For example, could you have trained or worked harder? Was your revision really all that it could have been? Did you really prepare for that interview in the best possible way?

Take responsibility for the factors over which you have control, and don’t be tempted to hide behind excuses.

5. Use failure as a way to improve

Don’t think of failure as failure. Instead, think of it as life’s way of showing you that you need to improve, and how to do so.

In particular, ask yourself what you could have done differently to achieve a better result. Then consider how you could put that into practice to help you to improve for next time.

Case study: Rising from the ashes of failure

In 1999, the England Rugby Union team lost to South Africa in the quarter-finals of the World Cup. Jonny Wilkinson, the fly-half, later commented that he had felt at least partly responsible for this disappointing and early exit from the competition, because he had not played very well. He said that this had encouraged him to work harder in the next few years.

Wilkinson was known for his obsessive approach to practising his kicking. He practised for hours each day from slightly different places on the field, until his accuracy became almost legendary.

In 2003, his persistence paid off. England won the World Cup in the final minute of extra time, with a drop goal from Wilkinson.

Would this have happened without the ‘failure’ in 1999? It is impossible to say, but Wilkinson himself certainly put some of the credit in that direction.

Think about failure differently, and your approach to both it, and the future, will be different.


Further Reading from Skills You Need

The Skills You Need Guide to Personal Development

Learn how to set yourself effective personal goals and find the motivation you need to achieve them. This is the essence of personal development, a set of skills designed to help you reach your full potential, at work, in study and in your personal life.

The second edition of or bestselling eBook is ideal for anyone who wants to improve their skills and learning potential, and it is full of easy-to-follow, practical information.

Winning and Losing with Grace

We try to teach children to win and lose games with grace: to accept the ‘two imposters as the same’.

We tell them not to ‘crow’ or ‘gloat’ when they have won, and we encourage them to accept defeat when they have lost. As adults, the wins and losses may not necessarily be on the sports field, but perhaps we can all learn a little from the idea that failure is only temporary.

Dealing with Failure: 3 Steps to Regain Peace of Mind

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

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